I'm just the right age. I have been blessed with the most amazing perspective on technology just because of when I was born, well - that and the right attitude. I still know folks my age who hate it and refuse to enjoy anything about it. Much older and you sort of missed the bandwagon. (Yes, I'm old enough to use the word bandwagon). Much younger than I am, and you grew up in a technological world. It has sprung up incredibly quickly and has completely taken over our lives as we knew them.
When I am employed, I spend most of my day on the computer doing one thing or another. Now that I am unemployed, I'm still on the computer. I can waste hours googling obscure facts, reading news, looking for good music on youtube, checking my email, listening to Bible studies, looking for jobs, writing my book and now blogging. In case I didn't have enough to do on the computer.
When I moved to Tucson in 1993, I remember seeing someone on a huge cell phone in the grocery store, and critical person that I tend to be, thought, " Oh, for crying out loud, what the $%#@ is SO important that you have to discuss it in the canned fuit aisle?"
One could now complain all day long, because everywhere one looks, people are staring down at their phones or now just chatting away, apparently to no one, until you catch a glimpse of the bluetooth attached to their ear. You could fill a dictionary with the new terminology that accompanies all this clutter we surround ourselves with.
At some point however, you have to choose whether to surrender your serenity because of what other people are doing - when you think of it, how silly is that; or you can choose to join them, to the extent that you so desire, or must do to keep current, keep a job or whatever.
Yesterday, I found myself actually trying to remember how I filled all the hours of a day BEFORE all this stuff, and guess what? I couldn't remember!!!!! Maybe some of it will come back to me if I start writing.
When I was 18 or 19, I lived with some friends in a sugar shack in Vermont. It had been used to boil down maple sap into syrup, and then converted into a little house for which we scraped together $60 a month. There was a revolving door of people who came and went, but I think when I lived there, five of us shared expenses. So I had to come up with $12 a month rent, and then some for food and utilities.
We sometimes walked the three miles into town, we skied and snowshoed, we listened to a lot of Grateful Dead, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and Poco, and we held long-running card-tournaments in the winter. We made up societies - if we were all reading, we called it a meeting of the North Danville Literary Society. One time, a friend came in the door, huffing and puffing and asking for our help as his car had slid off the road some distance away. We all suited up, grabbed all the shovels and raced to the rescue. After we dug him out, we drove around the back roads looking for others who were stuck. It must have been coming down pretty good, because we found others. We would pull up, jump out of the cars, dig the person's car out of a snowbank, jump back in our cars and drive off before he knew what had hit him. We thereafter became the North Danville Rescue Society. We embraced the world...
More random wanderings down this lane next time...
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