I received the text from my sister at around 8:30 on Valentine’s Day: “Michelle’s in labor.” I called her back immediately and asked, “How’s she doing?”
“She’s great,” my sister replied, laughing incredulously. “She just texted me from the hospital bed.”
To be fair, my sister and I are both using cell phones that might generously be called passé – my Motorola KRZR was already out of fashion by 2007, and my sister’s LG VX8600 (too ancient to bear a snazzy name sans vowels) may very well predate the Bush Administration. So, as a pair, we may not be the best barometer of what is reasonable in this technological age. Even accounting for that, however, it seemed astounding to me that Michelle could be sitting in a hospital bed simultaneously having contractions and battling with her T9 so as to spell out “epidural” rather than “drifted.”
I’m old-fashioned, I admit it. While my friends wirelessly sync their iPhones with their sleek Mac notebooks, I rifle through my Filofax and upload its contents to the calendar that sits on my desk by means of a ballpoint pen. It only makes it worse that my mother, now in her 60s, is more tech-savvy than I will ever be. “You should really get a Smartphone,” she urged me when I was home for Christmas last year.
“A what?”
“You,” she said absently as she texted her sisters, “are like a little old lady. You need to get with the times. Where are my reading glasses? ” Spluttering indignantly, I handed them to her.
Certainly, part of this resistance is a sort of post-traumatic stress reaction to the numerous times I’ve lost work due to the caprice of the computer gods. But a larger part of me protests that the convenience of a Kindle can’t compare with the intoxicating pristine crispness of a new hardcover, just as a message in your inbox pales alongside a handwritten letter from your best friend across the country.
Moreover, though my little Filofax may not be the tool of ruthless efficiency that the Smartphone is, it offers the incomparable advantage of waiting patiently to disgorge its contents until I’m ready for it without its insistently clamoring for my attention through ever-new, ever-mystifying means. I frankly yearn for the days when you could sit at dinner without having your friends constantly reaching for their various communication devices – or explaining neologisms in terms of other, slightly earlier neologisms. My friend and I were recently dining downtown when her BlackBerry buzzed.
“Look, he Pinged me!” My friend held out her screen for me to see. I squinted at the sudden blaze of the small screen in the candlelit dimness of the restaurant.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a Ping. Like a Poke on Facebook.” I gazed, nonplussed, at the capitalized, highlighted text.
“Is it like a game, or something?”
She looked at me with a pitying expression on her face. “I think you’re thinking too hard about this.”
“Very probably,” I admitted.
In my ongoing personal crusade against the coming of the Age of Machines, when I moved to the city, I armed myself with a Zagat’s, subscriptions to both the New York Times and New York Magazine (in their paper incarnations, thankyouverymuch), maps of everything south of 14th Street, and a small “New York” Moleskine notebook, which again contains various maps of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs. I grew increasingly enamored of that little notebook; I carried it everywhere with me for weeks, jotting down names and cross streets of places where I’d enjoyed particularly toothsome meals or notably heady cocktails.
The same evening wherein I learned, after a fashion, what Pinging was, my friend and I left the restaurant and headed out to meet some people at a bar that was supposed to be six or seven blocks away.
“Look!” I said, brightly. “I have my Moleskine. We can use the map.”
My friend eyed the smooth leather cover dubiously. “You know, we could just use my BlackBerry.”
No, I told her, I was a great navigator. Shackleton had nothing on me. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“I’m wearing heels,” she pointed out. “I left my adventuresomeness in my other shoes.”
“Come on, grump. It’ll be a learning experience. Now, where is Elizabeth Street?”
It must be said that she was a tremendous sport about the whole thing. Even as the streets grew more deserted and the amount of detritus lining the curbs increased, she kept her sounds of skepticism to a minimum. When we finally stopped under a street sign, she simply took one look at it and wordlessly pulled out her BlackBerry as I alternated between peering down at my Moleskine and staring up at the sign incredulously. “Well, that can’t be right.”
She held out the umbrella we were sharing and I took it. Within approximately ten seconds, she’d pinpointed our location and the location of the bar we were trying to get to. “Shall we?”
I sighed, and put my Moleskine away. We turned our backs on the dark street and started walking back in the direction of the way we’d come. After a moment of silence that was broken only by the brisk tap-tap-tap of her fingers on the tiny keys, I said, “I’m sorry about your feet. Do they feel alright?”
“They’re fine. I’ll be glad to sit down, though.”
“Yeah, me too.” I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it again. She looked up from texting and regarded me with a knowing look.
“You can keep your Moleskine, you know. And your organizer.”
“It’s a Filofax,” I said, absently. “Do you have a browser on that thing?”
“Of course.”
I pursed my lips. “Do you think you could look up how much a BlackBerry Pearl is?”
The browser window she opened covered a screen already populated by Facebook, Gmail, her work email, the aforementioned Ping conversation, and a Gilt Groupe shopping cart. As she began telling me about different features and prices, we picked up the pace, the click of our heels on the concrete sounding eager as we made our way up towards where we’d just been and the blindingly bright lights that lay beyond.
A relatively recent arrival to the city, Lena Kim enjoys writing about her experiences living in New York, including her gastronomic adventures on the website www.eatwithme.com.
