Friday, September 22, 2017

Analog is Me


We live in a digital age. I know this, believe me. I shoot with not one but two big digital cameras. I edit all photos on a big computer with powerful software. I work for a software company that deals every day and all day with public data. 

We all know that I love Instagram and Facebook and Twitter.

Don't try to take my iPhone away from me because I might have to cut you. 

And my iPad. Oh my iPad. Bringer of documentaries on Netflix and "Grantchester" on Amazon Prime. 

Dropbox, Evernote, Pepperplate, Ravelry. Digital, my life is digital.

But not completely. Not totally. There are still a few wild and woolly analog outposts in my life. There is the whole reading physical books. Don't get me wrong, I read a lot of digital books. I read a lot of books period. But I also read a lot of analog (for lack of a better term) books as well. I walked past a woman in CostCo yesterday and she was telling her teenager, who was holding up a book for her to see and possibly buy, "You can just put that book down. It is like, I don't know, 700 pages and you know that is about 659 pages more than I am ever going to read." 

It broke my little bookworm's heart to hear that. I can't imagine reading anything and everything that I can get my hands on. I have been known to read the ingredients on the can of bathroom spray if I can't find anything better to read while having my...golden moment.

TMI? You can't be surprise. Surely you can't.

I know that when the grandchildren arrive and are old enough....they get books. Of course, they also get candy for breakfast, but that is another story.

So, there is a place I am going with this whole analog thing. I swear there is. There is a corner of my life that I have deliberately switched back to analog from digital and I couldn't be happier.
Crazy as it sounds (and my brother, who is all things digital would say it is crazy), I have never been happier with my choice to go analog with my Bullet Journal and research information.

I have always been a person who enjoys writing things down in a physical way. I have loved lists all my life. I was that odd person in college who took notes in class and then re-wrote the notes as a way of studying and retaining things. Those notes were a thing of beauty and allowed me to achieve an "A" in my Med-Surg nursing course.

Of course the fact that I allowed the Neurosurgeon I was shadowing to convince me, a nursing student although admittedly an overly competitive nursing student, to scrub in and assist in surgery (and by assist I mean that he handed the little instrument to me and allowed me to remove brain tissue) might also have helped in achieving an outstanding grade. I wasn't sure how things would turn out when I realized the instructor was looking in and seeing what I was doing. But that is another story for another time.

I can say with some certainty that at this point I don't see myself going back to keeping lists and to do things and planning pages and all the minutiae of my day to day existence in any digital form.

ANALOG FOREVER! is my rallying cry.

At least until I want to check my Instagram feed....of which I have two by the way.