Darn near every day of my life the last thirty years, something happens that causes me think, "I couldn't have done that X years ago." When I think that, I'm thinking of something involving technology that did not exist a decade or three before, usually something involving my cell phone and/or my cellphone and, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the Internet. I look something up. I order something. I communicate with someone. I create something. Just writing on this blog and having you read it, possibly moments after I post it, is something that was impossible in an earlier part of my adulthood.
Less than an hour ago, I was lying in bed thinking about what I was going to do today. Since I ain't venturing out of the house, it pretty much came down to (a) what I'm going to write, (b) what I'm going to eat and (c) what computer-based chore I'm going to do. I have megabytes and megabytes of files on my computer that I need to sort through, deleting unnecessary ones and dupes and putting "savers" into their proper folders. I'm trying to devote an hour or so of each day of imprisonment to culling that stuff down.
So as I was lying there, I received a text message on my iPhone from a market that's supposed to deliver supplies to me today between Noon and 2 PM. It contained the happy words, "All items available," meaning that they didn't give my Thomas' English Muffins and my organic baby carrots to someone else. And I thought, "Gee, if you absolutely have to have a global pandemic, it's handy to have the Internet around." When they had the 1918 influenza plague, they had to get through it without online ordering.
I'm not being silly about this…I think. You have plenty of time right now to ponder things so maybe ponder all the ways this horrible infestation is a bit more endurable because you have certain inventions at your disposal, including whatever you're using to read this. Yesterday, I did a two-hour online video conference call about a project I'm working on. Couldn't have done that years ago. All week, I've been ordering items I need for my house. Couldn't have done that years ago. I've been learning things I need to know about the COVID-19 virus on the web and I don't feel as alone as I might have felt if I'd been in self-isolation in the eighties. And think of all the videos I can stream and watch and the books I can download to my iPad and read…
As I've been writing this, I received an alert from my alarm system that someone was on my front porch and the camera showed me it was a guy from Amazon delivering a package. I watched him enter some info into a wireless device and seconds later, I had a text message that a delivery had been made to me of something I ordered to reorganize part of my closet. That's something else I can do today.
We take a lot of this stuff for granted and that's okay but it's nice to pause for a mo and be a little amazed by things you can do now but couldn't do even late in the previous century. I also got an e-mail this morning from an actress I met briefly at a party some time back. She flirted with me for a few seconds while Amber was off to the bathroom or somewhere.
Now, this actress is saying that if I PayPal her any amount over $25, she will schedule an all-nude Facetime chat with me. I assume that means she'd be nude — not me — but you never know. I'm going to e-mail her back that I appreciate the offer but I have to go rearrange my closet, plus there are all those mystery files on my computer. I don't know what the hell some of them are…