Oh the frustration of not being online. It has driven me into a nondescript hotel bar around the corner of my new home, a brightly-lit impersonal bar full of rugby posters, two waiters and a drunk Irish couple and nothing else. Except myself, trying to connect to the web via my Internet-on-the-go-modem, a giveaway for the Dublinblog that I actually never gave away. I doesn’t work however, so no chatting to my girlfriend via Skype, no emails to read, no updates on travel blogs to publish and no thumbing-up on Facebook. It does seem I’ve really become dependent on the web. Being offline for the last 5 days already made me almost miss a meeting with the editors of one of the magazines I write for, not adhere to deadlines for another one and generally feel left out of the picture. I am online at work, but not to an extend as I was in my old house. So here I am, feeling the forces of withdrawal. It does feel as if this is depraving me of getting and staying in touch with the outside world. Hell, the outlook of doing manual research (in libraries! With books!) for articles in the next week or so without access to Google makes me sweat, almost. Also is this something I haven’t done in ages. The most frustrating thing about it is the fact that I can’t send this short piece here to my work-email to review it again tomorrow, not safe it in Google docs or do anything with it except use it as some kind of relief technique for the frustration that’s boiling inside me for almost a week now. What I’ll do is phone the Analog Girl later on, just to ease my suffering. Calling people on the phone is at least something I am still able to do, just like 10 years ago.