This is what my front patio actually looks like right now.
I’ve been stuck at home for 4 days in a row – at first by a nasty head cold and now by the biggest snowstorm I’ve ever seen in St Louis. High temps are in the negatives, my car is blocked by 2ft drifts, and my nose is still running like the Mighty Mississip. All of which leaves me to turn to – where else? My screens.
The oft-used metaphor of a screen as a window is an apt one. Trapped as I am, my computer is my window to the outside world, the TV to worlds beyond. I can still be socially present, keep up with everything that’s happening, create original work (this blog), and keep myself entertained. (I know my poor fiancé is getting cabin fever, but I’m actually kind of enjoying this.)
My daily screen schedule has consisted of, in various order:
- Phone:
- Texts
- Notifications
- Computer:
- TV:
- NFL playoffs
- Game of Thrones on HBO Go
- Netflix
- Sherlock
- Dr. Who
- Futurama
- Star Trek Voyager
- Various movies
- MarioKart on the Wii
- Assorted DVD’s
That’s a lot of screen time. Thank goodness for Google Chromecast, by the way. For those of you unfamiliar, it’s a $35 thumb-drive-looking thing that goes into your HDMI port and lets you stream from Chrome and a handful of other apps directly to the TV. It’s still got a ways to go – needs more apps to support it – but already this little dongle has revolutionized our TV habits.
The arguments for screens separating us from the real world have their validity, but on days like today, they serve just the opposite. I mean, what else would I do with myself? Read a book? Oh wait, yeah, I could do that.
The Screen Life 
(Then again, a book is basically just an analog, manually operated screen. The window may take more imagination, but it’s definitely still a window.)