When your favorite sister flies across the country for your birthday you sort of forget about things like the internet.

It wasn’t a deliberate decision, a pseudo-challenge to see if in fact I was capable of unplugging. Rather, it happened quite naturally. What could there be of more import than my one and only sibling?

And so I just backed away from it all and focused on the present. Not a single pin was pinned, nor tweet tweeted, nor pictured grammed nor email sent. The swirling vortex of the internet carried on with one less participant. My laptop died and I didn’t even notice. I forgot about my power cord. I set aside the feeling of needing to keep up with an entity that by its very nature is impossible to keep up with.

As a product of my tech-neration, it’s reassuring to know that some situations still inspire an effortless abandonment of digital devices in favor of what is real and right in front of me.