Taking a tumble down Maslow’s hierarchy

Last week I promised you Christmas carols, so it breaks my heart just a bit to be unable to deliver. But events have overtaken me.

Last Tuesday much of the Midwest was hit by a big ice storm. It took out utilities in several areas, including my home (though apparently not the houses across the street from us). We were only without electricity (and thus also without heat) for 24 hours or so. A lot of people had it a lot worse than we did. However, the experience taught me a few important things about my relationship with the media.

The key lesson was just how hard it is to manage the mental acuity necessary to read. Going into the outage, I figured it would be no big deal. We’d just pile on the blankets and read books by flashlight. Good plan, but it didn’t work out. Seems the cold that rapidly set in throughout the house made it impossible to concentrate on the printed word. It also made it difficult to sleep and even more difficult to cook, so hunger and fatigue weren’t exactly helping matters.

In short, consumption of print media is greatly helped by at least a toe-hold on the lower rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

The other lesson was just how sweet television was when the power finally came back on. But let me clarify this point. I didn’t find myself missing the TV at all. We didn’t get several of our regularly-DVR’d programs, and all of it was no big loss. What I was grateful for was something that didn’t require me to think. As our furnace struggled to bring us back to normal and Mrs. Lens gave in to exhaustion, I finished up Tin Man and moved on to the 1953 version of Julius Caesar. Though mentally I had trouble drawing crucial distinctions between Shakespeare and Sci Fi Channel crap, they were both all too easy to enjoy. It wasn’t a sense of “yay, the plug-in drug is back” as much as “this, at long last, is normal.”

It was an unwelcome but important wake-up. I had no idea just how dependent I’d become on things that many people do without. Mind you, I’m not going to be killing the furnace for the sake of some Nietzsche-esque enlightenment experience anytime soon. I’m glad I got the eye-opener, but I’m not anxious to repeat the lesson.