Recently everything is so cheap and low quality. My new laptop broke within a week- it has a micro thin glass panel that does nothing and cracked when I closed a bead inside the laptop, which, yes, I should have noticed I dropped a bead, but why was there a micro thin glass panel that does nothing, right at the hinge?
Clothes are also so cheap and ugly right now. It is normal to be able to see a butt which is inside of pants. I am dated now because of my belief that the butt should be obscured by clothes, not like in every situation forever but as the default. I am even more alone in my similar belief about the belly. I think no more than one in ten shirts for sale should show one's stomach. It is not bad to show but it's one of the main places I want covered for privacy and comfort if I am going to be wearing a shirt or a sweater. I did buy a sweater that just covered from wrists to collarbone but I never got used to it and now I am back dressing from my closet.
This all came up sort of suddenly. So, I've been naturally using what I have- the dream! And once absolutely sick of What I Have I have been shopping used and vintage like it's my job.
Much has been said about the typewriter along the lines of you can see it working. It truly doesn't get in the way of writing the way an internet enabled device does. Theoretically I am transcribing my typed pages into Microsoft word so they'll be shareable and editable but I only did one so far.
My Dad's calculator from the 1970s. Same as above, I prefer not to be doing my arithmetic on the cell phone screen because I will see notifications or apps on my to do list, such as meditating.
Thrifting in a pre owned flannel off ebay.
A typewriter I generated with Dall E. I guess I can't be mad that this is fake because... no one asked me to open an account on an AI generator and feed it prompts and save and upload the output. But I am still mad that I see these things, both in the wild and shared by people I know who are proud of their output. I want to see things a human made by default. I want to go in a special zone to see computer generated things.
So, in my discomfort I have been thinking much about my place in the world. Because I can remember when it was a little different. I don't exactly feel comfortably immersed in the present. The gap between what there is and what I imagine there should be, what it seems there used to be, is letting me see with new eyes.
I have started to think not just of the being I am, midway through life, but also the very, very similar beings who preceded me. Kind of like the idea, what if a caveman were here? Using the crosswalk, preparing food from the fridge- that would be hard for them. I have the same feeling- what if these women made of almost the exact stuff as me but born in 1962, 1939, 1906, had to use the search function on their phone to open google maps because there are too many apps to just see the map? They wouldn't like it, I bet, just like I don't like it.
After a few weeks of this kind of feeling I started emailing the ones from 1962 and 1939 and asking about the ones from 1904 and 1906. And I found a degree of fellowship that is unexpected. The stay at home wife and the young, nuclear family was really just a generation or two. The generation before had the depression to contend with, exactly like me and my $19 next day shipping entryway rug. Why is it polypropylene. Why don't I own my entryway so I can sand down to good wood and refinish it and it can glow in the sun. And the answer is economic conditions.
I sat down to decry the way my ancestors didn't stay put in one place for one single lifetime, but I sat down on the Macbook air and not the Smith Corona. So then I pulled all these photos of vintage things out of the cloud and that really pulled me away from my thesis. I will try again.
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