I don't like change. I never really have. I like to figure out how things are and get comfortable and I resist vehemently when people want to go and change things. That doesn't apply to every area in my life, but that is true of me for the most part.
It all started here. I was very comfortable viewing baseball through Marty colored glasses and I didn't need to be confused by any dissenting opinions. Then I start hanging around here and learning new things and what do you know, I don't know where I've left my Marty colored glasses. No great loss there. The frames were bent and things looked kind of blurry through them anyway.
Over the years I've always prided myself on my ability to find my way around the country with nothing more than an atlas and a local map for the city I was heading into, and I did pretty well doing that. But I started hanging around a web site for expedited truckers and more and more people kept talking about GPS units. I don't need something to tell me how to get around. I know how to read a map. People who can't read maps are idiots who shouldn't be behind the wheel of a vehicle.
Well, they wore me down. I now own a GPS unit. I haven't given up on the maps as well, because I think it's important to be able to find your way with them, but I've become hooked on the other features like finding local restaurants, grocery stores, and historical landmarks. I still use my atlas to route myself from city to city and then I just enter the route into the GPS, and I still think people who can't get around without one are idiots, but at least now I'm not so dead set against them. It will probably pay for itself pretty soon with the money I've saved not dialing 411.
And then there's music. I'm now in that "what are those young people listening to?" stage and that attitude had carried over not only to what they're listening to, but how they're listening to it. The whole mp3 thing just scares the daylights out of me. It's not that I don't like different formats for storing music, but I fear the end of the album. It seems to me that people are just grabbing individual songs all the time and that eventually artists are going to stop producing albums. I like albums. It's all I've known. I listen to them beginning to end, because that's what the artist created and that's how it was meant to be heard. Then recently I was at a friend's house and he showed me his ipod. I was expecting to see all these individual songs on there, maybe sorted by artist, but he showed me that he had actual albums stored on there and he could pull up an album and play it straight through, then select another one. That was a revelation to me. I guess I had never really thought it through, or even bothered to research it, but I now own an ipod.
But don't go thinking I've given up all of my curmudgeonly ways. My ipod only has complete albums stored on it. I just can't bring myself to download separate songs. Heck, I can't even bring myself to just download things. I found myself buying a CD the other day and then loading it onto the ipod. The CDs now stay with the stereo at home, which still has a turntable by the way, while the ipod goes on the road with me. I have my entire CD collection on there and I think I might work on converting some of my LPs, but only in their entirety.
Now texting...nah. I can't bring myself that far, but at least I'm for the most part living in the current century. That's a start, isn't it?