Are you busy? Of course you are. It’s the modern (Western, middle-class, parent, plugged-in) condition: For many of us, life unspools as a never-ending to-do list. Wake up, pack lunches, get the kids to school, get ourselves to our jobs, work all day, collect the kids, make dinner, supervise homework, do the laundry, walk the… Continue reading »
Archives for The Way We Live Now
The Soul of an Old Machine
I hit an unexpected and unwelcome writing hiatus this past month when my netbook stopped working. I want to say that the netbook died or that it decided to quit on me, but that would be giving it a life and a sense of being that it doesn’t deserve, much as I loved it. (And… Continue reading »
In Praise of the Telephone
According to the New York times, it’s fashionable to hate the phone (“Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You,” by Pamela Paul, NYT, March 28, 2011). I appreciate some of the anti-phone arguments. If a telemarketer rings you up at the dinner hour , it tends not to improve the evening. If you work as… Continue reading »
Redesigns for Living
Welcome to 2011. A lot of people I know were happy to see the back of 2010. I know how they feel; I finished the year with what my doc called a “humdinger” of a case of pneumonia, which put me in the hospital for 4 days right after Thanksgiving and wiped me out for… Continue reading »
Hyperabundance and Scarcity, or Enough Is Enough
There’s a stack of publishers’ catalogs on my desk at work nearly a foot high. There are 5, 645 messages in my mail inbox. My family’s digital photo archives contain about 13,000 pictures–and my kids are only in elementary school. You don’t want to know how many scraps of paper I have on my desk… Continue reading »
