I miss the good old days, before tech dependency became a disorder

Longing for the days before technology took over my life, I sit here at my laptop bemoaning its restart to perform necessary updates.  This put me completely off schedule, and I have shit to do. Because I couldn't possibly have grabbed a pad and pen and started actually writing this blog.  Oh hell no. God forbid I have to put ink on paper. What a gross inconvenience! Never in my life did I dream I'd say something so fucking ridiculous. I used to love to write, keeping journals, writing stories and poems, making lists, writing letters to friends and family.  Ladies, how many of you remember altering and tweaking your handwriting over the years, especially as a pre-teen? Swoops and loops, hearts and circles, and cute smileys were all a part of my handwriting repertoire at some point. My printing went through what could now be described as font changes over the years. By the time I was in my early 20s, I was printing in all caps and I thought it looked cool!
These days, nobody bothers to buy pretty stationery and pens that write in just the right shade of blue and smoothly glide across the page as you pour your heart out in a weekly letter to the best friend who lives in another state. I'm lucky to get actual paper cards for my birthday because most people think it's enough to post on my goddamn Facebook wall or shoot me a text on my iPhone. Newsflash fuckers, I like cards!  I still send them to you, and yes, I take great care and time choosing one that I feel suits YOU. When did it become too much effort to purchase, address, and mail a card to someone?  Do friends and family mean that little to you? We are only worth a quick text on the fly? Christ on the cross. The only time I get any volume of cards is during Christmas time, and let me tell you, that number has decreased significantly over the years...and so has my Christmas card list. Fuck me? Fuck you.
The mere fact that sending something via the United States Postal Service is now referred to as snail mail, speaks volumes about the society we've become. Aside from my odd animal loving daughter, who truly likes snails, they are vastly unloved. They are slimy, unattractive, dirty and icky.  By the same token, something that travels in an envelope with a stamp in the upper right-hand corner is equally repulsive? This is the beginning of the end. Who didn't look forward to a post card from a traveling relative? Can you honestly say you didn't have a pen pal as a child? How can you NOT enjoy having something arrive addressed to only you that you get to open up like a shiny wrapped gift on Christmas morning? What the fuck is wrong with us? It takes time, effort, emotion, and a sincere desire to communicate with someone when you place pen to paper and inscribe words to express yourself. We are devoid of feeling, heartless bastards.

So, when I felt utterly lost without the keyboard of my laptop earlier this afternoon, I recalled pounding away on my old Underwood Olivetti that used to be my Uncle Frankie's, and how much I enjoyed the actual act of typing. The loud clicks my fingers produced with every letter, the zzzziiiipppp zzzhhhhiiingggg sound when I pushed the carriage release lever to move to the next line, and joy I felt when I sounded oh-so-professional as I motored through another paper for school. Even a mistake held its own brand of fun, when else could you use correction paper? Sliding that small white sheet of paper with the chalky white correction substance on the back between the keys and the paper and slamming the incorrect key on it to annihilate the error was a powerful experience!  Kids today are missing out on great stuff.
While we are on the topic of me banging away on my old school typewriter, let's dive into why I was using it. Research papers, essays, and generally important documents for school. How did I do that?  What means was used to gather this crucial information to be later typed on my cambridge blue typewriter? That would be a combination of my Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia set and the Maspeth Library's vast collection of BOOKS. Yes, books, with pages and pages of printed material containing all kinds of fascinating information awaiting perusal. Pulling the card catalog open armed with a small square of paper and what would be considered a mini-golf sized pencil today, you flipped through card after card, searching for pertinent information, jotting down the all-important numbers of classification.  It was then that you got to really do some legwork, strolling up and down the stacks, surrounded by the scent of old paper and ink, attempting to locate those treasured and much-needed books.
Today, Wikipedia has all but replaced real research techniques.  People actually believe they are researching a topic when they "Google" it. A small child can type something into a search box and hit the ENTER key. It takes someone with at least a basic level of intelligence to walk into a library and find all that information on their own.  Computers have made us soft and lazy. We Google, copy and paste, type out our rough drafts instead of writing them out on sheets and sheets of looseleaf paper to be typed up after we edited it by hand with a red pencil.  This generation has Microsoft Word to edit their papers, Grammarly.com, and a whole host of other online assistants to do the job we used to do all by ourselves. What's so hard about the way we did things? Why do kids have to have everything at their fingertips? Can't they work for results like we did, or are they actually LESS enterprising, less industrious, less creative, and dare I say it, less intelligent than we were 30-something years ago?
What would make me happy, you ask? I would love to bring back the good old days of letter-writing and flipping though the pages of a well-worn book to seek information. The elation we all used to feel when we ran to the mailbox to see if there was anything in it for us, excluding the bills we all now dread. Although, really, many of us choose the paperless billing option anyway, so the dread factor has been greatly reduced in recent years. The heady, intoxicating smell of an old book and feel of its smooth, time-softened paper as you gently turn the pages, reading real printed ink. Even the crack of the spine as you open a brand new book for the first time, making it yours and breathing in that "new book" smell. Words jumping off the page, pulling you in to a new adventure, to another time, or place.
Instant gratification, over-scheduling our lives, placing ourselves before anyone else and stifling the urge to actually connect with another human being...these things are contributing to the downfall of our society and quite frankly make me want to cry. There are way more douchebags and ass clowns surrounding me in 2012 than there ever were in the first 20 years of my life, giving me daily reasons to write to you.  If you want to lose the feeling of face-to-face human connection, the warmth of a bear hug, the feeling of creating something handwritten with your own fingers and a pen that can bring a smile to another person's face, the mental vacation that a book can provide for you, and just that basic "I did it myself" feeling...go right ahead. I'm going to continue sending cards and letters and filling my bookshelves with actual books that I happily read every chance I get. Am I excited about what the future holds if this is the direction we are heading now? Are you friggin kidding me right now???