Laptops on Vacation

This post falls into one of those categories I call “bourgeois concerns.” My husband is a former Marxist who once told a man that I’m a Bolshevik, so please forgive me. (I am not really a Bolshevik.)

Tomorrow, that former-Marxist husband and I head south for a couples-only vacation. We will read and eat at restaurants and take naps and wander around galleries and feel like our old selves again. It will be wonderful. It is not lost on me that I am intensely fortunate to have this opportunity, because despite what Suze Orman would recommend, we seem to be able to afford it (even though I will wince terribly when I see the credit card bill). I have wonderful in-laws who are willing to suffer five days’ exhaustion, and my children have relatively clean noses and normal body temperatures at this moment (which, of course, will change as soon as I publish this post).

The bourgeois concern in question, then, is this: Should I take my laptop?

Technology is a tricky thing on vacation. In my daily life, it is the thing that gives me the comfort of adult interaction and intellectual stimulation while I wipe dirty faces and pick up toys. But oftentimes, too many words coming at me through computer screens and other devices have the same mental impact as five bags of cheese curls.

Just last week, when I sat Missy Mae in a high chair at the farmer’s market and split a cheese danish, I habitually picked up my phone. I checked in on any number of small lit-up squares, only to realize I didn’t want to. I put the phone away and instead listened to the conversation of the women behind me about men whose mothers still do their laundry and children who travel to France in the summer. I looked out the window at people trudging through the nearby grocery store, some in expensive flats and ornate necklaces, others in yoga pants and tank tops. Where are they all going next? I thought. Where are they coming from? What houses, what families, what dark recesses?

And I realized that I don’t do this anymore, just sit and stare and watch people and let my mind wander. What I do instead, too often, is block out the periphery and keep my vision limited to a small metal box. I subconsciously assume—as many of us do–that I can find everything within that box, that there is no reason to look elsewhere, even for emotional sustenance or mental stimulation. And, of course, I am wrong.

I used to watch people and be inspired by the diversity of their mannerisms and appearances. I’d notice the way the branches of trees blew in the early morning. I’d let my mind wander, and I was usually excited and appreciative of where it went. In the car, I’d listen to mix tapes and allow the lyrics to take me on long journeys to new landscapes of heart and earth. Now, I  check my email any number of times in a day, but am rarely prepared to think and deliberate and respond, whether to a friend’s serious issue, a thoughtful news article, a petition to vote, a student’s plea.

So, even though I have a few writing projects I’d like to work on during this nice and quiet break from my lovely but tiring children, from the laundry and the dishes and the mail, I will leave the laptop at home. Instead, I’ll fashion myself after writers of old, who carried around notepads and recorded their thoughts, who knew that on the next page, and the next, there was only a blank sheet of paper to fill not with the meanderings of others, but their own observations and imaginings. I will let myself in.

After all, a laptop on a beach seems as awkward and disrespectful to nature as stubbed out cigarettes in the sand.

What do you think of taking laptops or other technological devices on vacation? Does it add to your experience or take away?

Image: “Beach Fencing” by mmahaffie via Flickr using a Creative Commons license.

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Tagged as: bourgeois, laptop, vacation