I Swear I'm Not Paranoid, Part One

I've watched too many movies and television shows, I know. At some point a few weeks or months ago, a frightening thought occurred to me: what if instead of a nuclear attack, the next great (possibly apocalyptic) event is instead an EMP weapon? Think of what would happen to our country without electricity. Millions would die. We live in a world in which we are becoming increasingly dependent upon technology for just about everything. We don't read map - we have GPS. We don't write letters - we have cell phones, email, texts and just about every method you could think of to make communication less and less personal. I hope I'm not the only one that finds it frightening. 

Even before this thought occurred to me, I've always been a person who appreciated doing things by hand. I love hand-made furniture. I own a 60 year-old camera. I used to milk goats. I like the thought that if I had to, I could survive in a technology-less world. I still have my phone/laptop/tv, but I'm not particularly attached to them. I like reading actual books. With paper. You remember those, right? I like to write letters - I just don't have anybody to whom I can write them. I'd grow my own vegetables if plants didn't wither if I even came near them. 

I can't get out of my head the video that made the rounds recently of a one year-old girl who kept trying to turn the pages of a magazine like an ipad and didn't seem to get why it wasn't working. That's about the saddest commentary on our society that I can imagine, and it doesn't seem safe to not be teaching our children how to survive in a tech-free world. What's so wrong with a card catalogue? With riding a bike? With reading a map? With actual face-to-face conversations? 

And don't worry, the irony of typing this on my laptop to be posted online is not lost on me...

Procrastination Party

It's a nice day, and while I managed to drag myself up to Ithaca, I'm sitting here sifting through that probably mostly fake auto-correct site and laughing so hard I'm annoying the woman with the ugly shoes sitting next to me. (Yeah, see, that's what you get for shooting me dirty looks, you sartorially challenged meany.)

I thought before about changing the direction of this blog to one that will focus more on the process of writing a novel, but since that will apparently take five years...Plus, I like writing down my weird dreams and my occasionally snarky musings. 

If anybody had told me that it would take this long to write a book, though, I might have been deterred. Well, probably not, but I would have thought twice about it. While drinking coffee. And playing Sims. Yeah, that could be a reason. I just don't know how to plow through a section when I know it needs a LOT of work, or skip through a section for a time when I can't figure out how to begin. So, it's taken me a scary amount of time, but I'm finally at 200 pages. Booyah. I'm still telling myself I'm 2/3 of the way there since my original goal was to write 300 pages, but the reality is the book will probably be closer to 400. Anyhoo...those auto-corrects won't read themselves.