24-hour Technology Fast

I woke to my wife mixing up some whole wheat pancake batter and getting a small fondue warmer ready to make me some breakfast.
"You're so lucky I love you," she said.
I didn't expect her support for the day, but I was glad to have it.
My first reaction was to go for my camera to take a picture. Then I realized I couldn't capture this moment. No one would ever be able to see our makeshift little stove in our dining room. I knew the day was going to be hard.
I had told my wife about my decision to go without electricity as much as I could the day before; I had thought I'd just eat raw food all day, along with keeping the lights off, not turning on the computer and unplugging all the clocks. I did leave the heat on because I have two little kids, and I left the fridge plugged in, because I'm too lazy to take all the food out and into coolers for one day (so much for total immersion).
I sat at the table, which now looked like a camping unit, and my wife poured the first pancake. After three minutes she tried to flip it, but the heat wasn't quite enough. The batter smeared off the spatula and made a big mess across the skillet. It took a full five minutes before it was cooked.
"I'll make the next one smaller," she said.
The kids were not handling the wait well. My three-year-old kept calling the next pancake when it was meant for someone else. After thirty-five minutes, we had eaten what would've normally taken six at the most, and I was still hungry. I cut up an apple and dipped it in some peanut butter and shared some with my boys. Lesson learned: electricity makes it possible to prepare a lot of food very quickly. Without it, eating, a thrice daily necessity, takes up a lot more time.
Normally at this time, my wife and I would put a movie on for the kids and go upstairs to take a shower, which was now not an option. On top of that, I wasn't sure if the water was heated with electricity or not. So I just didn't shower.
My wife went to book club and left me with the kids. Lesson learned: Children and electricity go very well together; and I am a bad parent. Movies and video games make handling kids for long stretches of time quite easy. They don't move around very much and therefore don't break/wreck/topple/burn/maim things when they are watching a screen. I can only push a toy train around a track so many times before I need something else to do, and keeping track of where two children are while simultaneously trying to pay attention to one of them enough that he doesn't constantly call out your name is not easy. But we had fun. I built a very good looking figure-8 track and Elliot was quite impressed with it.
One benefit to not relying on TV as a babysitter was that putting the children down for a nap was much easier. Actually playing takes a lot of energy, and neither kid complained much as I put them in bed.
Dealing with no lights during the day wasn't a problem. I kept candles and a lighter in the bathroom. I'll tell you, "going" by candlelight is soothing, but it made it hard to read my Outside Magazine.
With the kids in bed, I undertook my big challenge of the day, washing all the dishes by hand. We had been lazy for a few days and also made some big meals, so there was quite a pile that needed scrubbing. We have a single sink, so figuring out how to wash and rinse was tricky. Again, I had the unrequited urge to snap a photo of the huge line of dishes drip drying on every inch of available counter top. Sigh. In the end, I am sure that the dishes weren't as clean as they are after coming out of the dishwasher. Lesson learned: after wrinkling up my fingers for an hour cleaning out cups, I thought twice about grabbing a new cup when I had only drank water out of the last one.
One of the biggest things I noticed about life with no technology is that everything is slow and boring. Perhaps the whiplash of relative slowness gave me something akin to jetlag; I ended up sleeping a lot of the day. My wife and I went to bed at 9:30. Usually, doing the dishes takes me at most ten minutes (actually it takes me no time at all because my wife usually does them, but still). With no dishwasher, it took a full hour and a half. Without technology, our lives would be one long chain of tasks that only take care of ourselves, making food, cleaning up afterward, getting water, disposing of waste, etc. After all that, I wouldn't have time to bother with things like blogging and tweeting and facebooking and learning and entertaining myself. Or maybe I would, but I'd have to have reserves of energy I don't have right now.
Also, about going to bed at 9:30, it really made me wonder how often my body is crying out for me to go sleep, but I can't hear it because I'm too busy watching the Biggest Loser or hitting the refresh button.
The biggest thought provoker for me from this whole experiment was the idea of the importance of a moment. What did I lose by not getting a picture of the impromptu stove, or the line of dishes? Who misses out when I don't update my facebook status with interesting insights I get? If I don't record a memory, what's it worth? If I'm the only one that felt it, is that enough? I feel lucky that I get to blog about this, and to be honest, I was writing this blog entry all throughout my fast, knowing that at the end I was going to be able to publish my thoughts here. But what if I didn't have that opportunity? Would the world be in any way affected if I didn't write this post?
I think technology helps distract us from facing these existential crisis moments because we can constantly confirm the importance of moments in our lives through social networking. More than once during this experiment I have felt utterly alone. I tried to imagine writing a letter to someone as the only means of communicating my deepest fears and feelings, knowing that it could be weeks before I got a response, and I can't describe the mind-numbing horror I felt. How did generations before us make it through the day with their brains turned on?
I couldn't do it. In fact, I failed a lot during my one day. We tried to just be in the dark after the sun went down, but then we used flash lights, justifying that they were what we'd have to use if the power went out. Eventually we gave up and just flipped the light switches. I ended up heating up yesterday's mac and cheese in the oven because I didn't want to eat it cold. My wife and I went running and had to use the car because we run around Boomer Lake and couldn't figure out a simple way to run 6 miles from our door step without using the internet. When we came back from running, Natasha asked if it was OK to start a movie for the kids while we showered and I told her that I was just going to plug my ears and she could do what she wanted.
We are pampered. We are coddled. If our electricity were to go out one day, we would be completely and utterly screwed.
But as of right now, I really like being connected to other people instantaneously. I really like having a superhuman memory through my computer prostheses. I love knowing that in a few keystrokes, someone can be aware of me and my thoughts.
I am a cyborg, and I'm okay with it.