Thursday, January 14, 2010

Out With the New, In With the Old

Oh, the horror that is the New Year's resolution.


You know it. You make it. You love it.

Well, you love it for, what? A month, tops? Then you hate it. I've been right there with you. But with the winding-down of 2009 - a year I was ready to put behind me for reasons I have ... and have not ... shared here - I felt the urge to make 2010 different.

As I spent the last week of the year enjoying family, friends, and food (including the glory known as Baby's Homemade Christmas Eve Pierogies ... yes, you should be jealous), I pondered my goals for 2010. They seemed trivial (read more), comical (drink less), typical (lose weight), or impossible (be less judgmental of those whose spelling success lives or dies not on genuine spelling acumen, but on the absence of squiggly red lines). These resolutions, while perfectly functional, were duds. I wanted a resolution that MEANT something. I wanted to work towards a goal that, at the end of 2010, I could look back upon and feel a great sense of accomplishment about. I wanted the Cadillac of resolutions.

Well, that smooth-riding luxury sedan of an idea didn't pull into my consciousness and toss its keys to my mental valet until only a few hundred ticks before midnight on New Year's Eve.

To ring in the new year without risking our lives on Amateur Night Highway, Baby and I had decided to whip up a batch of cocktails and partake in Turner Classic Movies' Thin Man movie marathon - an airing of all six William Powell/Myrna Loy screwball-mysteries, in order, uncut and uninterrupted, all night long. Of course, by "all night long," we meant that the TV would be on all night long; we predicted tipsy slumber would carry us away sometime during the third film.

As an aside, I love the Thin Man films. I've seen them all countless times, I've quoted them in social situations, and I own (or have owned) copies of them in various forms, including LaserDisc. (For those of you unfamiliar with the LaserDisc, it was the "cutting-edge" format available between the VHS and DVD periods; imagine a DVD the size of a record album. For those of you unfamiliar with record albums, isn't it a school night for you?)

So there we were, Baby and me, with only a few minutes to go before the big midnight toast. As I had done in so many other must-see situations, I wielded my remote control like a Jedi using lessons learned from Obi-Wan TiVobi. Somewhere in the 58th minute of the 11th hour of the 365th day, I paused the Thin Man movie and switched tuners to catch Father Time (Dick Clark) and Baby New Year (Ryan Seacrest) ring in 2010. And it was at that moment of ultimate convergence - old year and new year, old host and new host, old movies and new technology - that it hit me: life has gotten easier, but in the process, life has lost its simplicity.

It's right about now when you might think that I will turn treacly and begin to yearn for the pleasures of my youth, all the while condemning the ills of technology. I won't, because today's technology enables me to revisit the pleasures of my youth, and for that, I love the technology.

Thanks to DVDs and downloads, and e-places like Amazon and Netflix, I can watch almost any movie at almost any time. And if I'm feeling frugal, or if a certain film is out of print, I can program my TiVo to record it on TCM and use my DVD burner to capture it forever.

As another aside, I love TiVo. I also love Turner Classic Movies. Oh, and I simply adore I-Tunes, because I-Tunes lets me spend $.99 on a song today that I spent $8.00 for in 1986 because I had to buy the whole cassette to get the one song I really wanted.

Yes, technology has made it possible for us to have whatever we want whenever we want it, all with little effort. And therein lies the core of my 2010 resolution. My lament about life's ease versus life's simplicity is about how our ability to have many of the things we want - often literally with the touch of a button - has dulled not those things, but the simple joy those things used to bring.

I don't love the Thin Man movies just because of the movies themselves; I love them because I remember stumbling across them on the Million Dollar Movie at two in the morning when I was a kid. That was special. So was finding obscure Italian horror films on the Saturday afternoon Creature Double Feature on a local UHF channel. (For those of you unfamiliar with UHF, Google it.) Now? That joy of discovery is gone. Why? Because I can just ... go get the movies whenever I want them.

So, too, is gone the joy of anticipation. If you were a kid at Christmas in the '70s and '80s, the broadcast schedule for the old Rankin/Bass productions of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Year Without a Santa Claus, and others like them, was burned on your brain, and if you missed an airing because you forgot or because your parents took you clothes shopping that night or because you were grounded, well, see ya next year, kid. Now? My daughters watch them on DVD, and they like them well enough, but there's no sparkle there, because watching them is not about being parked in front of a TV at 8:00 on a Thursday night in December; watching them is about pulling the discs off the shelf in the middle of June if they want to.

Also missing is the joy of hope. That kind of joy used to come with opening pack after pack of baseball cards - stale gum and all - hoping to get that Richie Hebner card to complete your Phillies team, or even going to a hobby shop to flip through countless binders to look for that one last card you needed to complete the whole set. Now? Just go to a website and have it shipped. Even I-Tunes sucks the joy out of hunting through bins of records or tapes or CDs in an effort to find that ONE tune that was the choice cut from the soundtrack of your youth.

And what about the joy of sharing that used to come when your sister visited you to look at photographs from that crazy party you both went to a few weeks prior? Sure, now you can look at pictures on Facebook as soon as the party is over, but it's hard to reminisce about an event that is only hours old, and it's not as much fun to point and laugh at a screen alone, and in ten years you won't visit your attic and happen across a shoebox full of Facebook and think back to the good old days.

My 2010 resolution is not about unplugging the internet, or hooking up the rabbit-ears (again, if you have to ask ...), or canceling the I-Tunes account. My resolution is about shifting the balance between Simple Joy and Get It Now. It's about doing a little more digging through the bins and a little less clicking of the mouse. It's about sometimes checking the television schedule instead of sometimes checking the shipping schedule. It's about risking the unknown instead of guaranteeing delivery. It's about sharing memories, not sharing URLs.

My 2010 resolution is about making sure that the things in my life are IN demand, not ON demand.

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