For somebody who is supposed to be in the prime of his life, moving and shaking, on top of this changing world, it appears I’m brutally behind the times. Not long ago I was at an advertising meeting with a car dealer, and while I waited for our meeting to start, I relaxed into one of the new models on the floor, out of curiosity more so than any real thoughts of buying a new car. The dealers on the floor must have known I wasn’t there to buy anything (rather, I was there to sell; how’s that for backwards) and left me alone. And thank goodness because I thought I was sitting in a rocket ship and not a 2012 4-door sedan. For starters, there was no starter! No ignition. Just a button where the ignition was supposed to be. And on the dash was a dock of four USB ports. Presumably to plug in your cell phone, laptop, iPad, chewing gum, what have you. I haven’t driven a new car in almost 12 years and couldn’t help thinking, “Wow, have things changed,” as if the last car I drove was a Packard.
Music is a big part of my life. Aside from when I write (like now), I always have music on while I work. However, driving isn’t for music but for reading audio books, unless my wife is in the car; then she takes control. For years we’ve been talking about buying an iPod so we can stop making the equivalent of the 1980s mix tape and burning song after new song onto a never-ending and nerdy supply of CDs that we tote around with us like cargo. We thought this year we might forge ahead and buy ourselves an iPod until Sun Day Managing Editor Mason Souza (who apparently is up to date) told us iPods were quickly, if not already, defunct, replaced by the almighty cell phone. You mean you can carry your music on that thing? And you can listen to it your car? How? Then I remembered the USB ports.
This next one I’m going to give myself some leeway on. I lived in a condo for the past twelve years, with no opportunity to decorate the exterior for Christmas. Now that I live in a house, I looked forward to stringing up some lights. Nothing extravagant, nothing Clark Griswald, just a few strands on our porch. Easy. Except when I went to the store to buy the lights, I thought I’d walked into the Christmas store of the future where LED rules. Again with the initials! According to the pictures on the boxes, I was gearing up to direct the landing patterns for air traffic rather than spread some Christmas cheer. What happened to the old-fashioned bulb lights?
Speaking of those, in the last edition we ran a special pullout section called Sun Day Extra. The cover featured a photo of a menu item at Niko’s Lodge, which one of our new photographers, Rebecca Vazquez, shot. Rebecca and I used those old-fashioned bulb lights as props to dress up the scene while Mason, who joined us to interview the head chef, watched. When he saw me pull out those lights, he first asked me if they were real. I told him yes and griped about how they don’t make these anymore. He touched one, realized it was actually hot, and said, “There’s probably a reason for that.”
All this said, so what if I’m a little behind on the times. It’s not like my TV has rabbit ears. The other night, though, I realized that maybe I’m not so much behind on the times but behind on time in general.
A week ago, I was up working late, and for no reason at all, our power went out for about five minutes (right in the middle of designing an ad, mind you) around 1 a.m. Two hours later, I finally turned in. When I go to bed that late, I don’t like risking waking my insomniatic wife lest she decides to make it the start of her day, so I sleep in our spare room, where I keep a digital alarm clock. Just as I turned out the lights, I saw my alarm clock was blinking from the power outage, but I was too tired to march all the way back downstairs and find out what the actual time was. So I guessed the time and proceeded to set the alarm for four hours later. My alarm went off at 7:00, and I was only 20 minutes late to work when I rolled out of bed and walked straight to my office downstairs.
