Confessing to Tech Love

I'm finished with college!!! Hooray hooray! So, I've moved back home and have just been chillin' for about a week now, and it's awesome.  This is the first time since I was 13 that I haven't had a job.  I'm taking a break (for about 2 weeks, maybe 3).  Working anywhere from 2-4 jobs, at the same time, during undergrad helped pay the bills, but was NOT fun.  Although I must say, lifeguarding at RIT was a pretty nice gig.  Anyway, doing nothing makes it difficult to find the motivation to do anything.  So, I'm on the hunt.  Updating my resume, picking up applications, and eventually filling them out is a throwback to last years internship search.  We'll see how it goes.  I'll let you know what happens.

In the process of updating the resume, I realized that I'm giving out my home phone number... I haven't had to give out the family digits since high school!  It's pretty strange, but fun nonetheless.  My friends are always asking me, "How do you expect to find a job if you don't have a cell phone!?"  I think my generation has forgotten about landlines.  It's not like I've fallen off the freakin' face of the planet, folks.  I can still be contacted.

There are my thoughts on employment, but that is not the only thing that has been going on in the past two weeks.

There are some confessions to be made (completely unrelated to the job search business).  As someone who has been writing down her rants against modern technology, I have to admit that I've recently succumbed to the temptation of one of my greatest adversaries... the Kindle.

I know.  I've already been yelled at and criticized by many of my closest friends.  They know how I feel about books, my passion for paper, and my fanaticism about the way ink is laid on a page.  I have been an advocate for the tangibility of a printed book, and still am.  There is nothing that can replace the feeling of a smooth cover, or the pages between your fingers as you turn into the next chapter of a journey, otherworldly.  These are things that I still believe in, but I like my new Kindle too.

My parents gave it to me for graduation, which is what I often use as an excuse when my friends look at me like I'm nuts.  This was a week ago, and I've finished Alice in Wonderland and am currently trying to figure out where I left off in the library version of Anna Karenina.

When all is said and done, there are two things that come into play in a book (the printed kind).  There's the book, the physical manifestation of a process from tree to pages.  Books are art.  Books are beautiful.  Books are valuable.  Remember, right now I am talking about the book, meaning the paper, the binding, the design, the materials, ect.

The second thing that contributes to a book is the written word.  Books have always been so closely associated with their content because, until now, there has been no other way to deliver that content to its intended audience.  The words within the book, and the book itself are actually two different things! They are two different forms of artistic expression.  Writing is a skill, and so is bookmaking.

These two different art forms complement each other very well, which is why printed books and magazines will never go out of circulation entirely.  Combined with the fact that electronics are so unpredictable (many times unreliable) and ever changing, I'd say there is still more than one solid argument against e-books and things of similar nature.

However, I don't believe that the physical form of a book defines the quality of its content.  As a reader, I would choose the printed word over electronic any day.  However, as a writer, I don't really care how my work gets to readers (as long as it's being read).  I think that many writers, past and present, would feel the same.  A poem, a story, or a commentary is still made of the same words whether printed or electronic.  It is most likely more aesthetically pleasing in printed form, but I believe that the goal of most writers is to have their work read regardless of aesthetics or mode of delivery.

I still buy books.  Friends of the Library in Ithaca, New York recently had a books sale where every book was ten cents (they often have really awesome book sales, so check out the link if you're interested).  I broke the bank with $1.60, and walked away with 16 new additions to my book shelf.

Children's Literature has also been one of my recent addictions, and I have to say that print plays a more important role in this arena.  Children NEED printed books.  It's a developmental thing.  They learn so much more by interacting with pages, and discovering how to care for things (books) that are easily damaged.  Kids just grow by having an actual book in front of them.

I also buy hard copies of the books that I enjoy reading on the Kindle.  If it's a really great book, I want to make sure I have it, printed, for future re-reading and sharing.  I generally also tend to be a sucker for cover art (this is one way the Kindle helps me save money; I don't buy e-books that I will never read for the cover art), so works that I love on the Kindle are works that I often want to be supplemented by the art of a book.

Anyway, I'm having fun reading, and I hope you are too.  I know this post really had nothing to do with cell phones, but not everything in life does, and that's just the way I like it.