My disconnected vacation

Although the destination we’d chosen for our late-August vacation is renowned for its water park, indoor-outdoor aquarium, tropical beaches, and world-class restaurants, my attitude heading into it was that for me, vacation would be a success if I had plenty of time to read and go for walks.

I definitely got my wish – and then some. With the kids happy to avail themselves of all the sun-and-sea recreation free of parental oversight, I had all the time I wanted to sit poolside and read. And I had time for walking, too. Along with a 4-mile run early every morning, while the rest of my family slept, I fit in a late-afternoon walk on the beach every day, sometimes on dry sand, sometimes in the shallowest waves, with the warm water bathing my feet as I made my way first up the island’s extensive shoreline and then back down.

Untethering from email and Facebook was a big deal; not having Internet for filing any articles or doing any work at all while away was an even bigger deal; but I was resigned to both before we left. Internet fees and roaming charges at our destination were just too expensive for us to consider getting on line at all, and I was both apprehensive and curious as to what a fully disconnected vacation would feel like.

But it turned out I was even more disconnected than I anticipated. Upon boarding our flight to the Bahamas, Rick and I both set our phones to airplane mode, but I still planned to keep my phone close at hand so that I could listen to podcasts I’d downloaded before we left, take pictures with my phone’s camera, and time my runs and walks. So I was unprepared for my phone to stop working altogether on the third day of the trip. No more podcasts or photos or stopwatch or alarm clock or any other phone functions I’d come to depend on.

And then the following day, mysteriously enough, my Fitbit stopped working. No more timing my workouts with that, or logging my steps or miles. Suddenly I was far more disconnected than I’d imagined being.

Which meant I had to get by without my usual electronic dependencies. Without my phone’s clock function or the stopwatch on my Fitbit, I had to time runs and walks with my watch, like I used to do back in the 90’s. I had to trust myself that 45 minutes or whatever time I’d set as my goal was a decent workout, even without being able to see just how many steps or miles that entailed. Without access to the podcasts stored in my phone, I turned instead to my 12-year-old for help with audio entertainment to keep me engaged during my run; she lent me her iPod, on which she’d stored the audiobook version of a middle grade novel by a favorite author of hers, and while I ran, I listened not to my favorite NPR podcasts but to the story of a sweet but frustrated 12-year-old trying to get along with her disorganized family.

Though it was disappointing to return home with what felt like a fistful of broken appliances, and losing all the photos that I’d taken early in the trip with my phone was certainly unfortunate, it was good for me to be forced to be so disconnected. It turns out exercise feels good even when you don’t have an official readout of your step count at the end. It turns out middle grade fiction is pretty well-crafted these days. It turns out I can wake up at a decent time merely by relying on my natural biorhythms and not the chirp of my iPhone at a pre-set time.

Most importantly, I did lots of reading and took lots of walks. That, after all, is what I had hoped to do. And all four of us had a great time together. The day after we got home, I was able to get my phone repaired and replace the Fitbit. Being disconnected is a good experience, at least for the course of a weeklong vacation. In a way, I’m glad it happened. It was a great vacation, glitches not withstanding. In fact, maybe the glitches made it an even better vacation.

A cracked screen -- and a worthwhile reminder

Yesterday’s Boston Globe had a cover story about a freelance computer repairman who is rapidly gaining fame – and presumably fortune – for his skills at repairing non-warrantied damage to iPhones. What primarily caught my attention other than the fact that this guy’s own iPhone is going to crash merely from the number of calls he’s going to be receiving as a result of this story was what he said the two major forms of damage done to iPhones are. One is that they get dropped into toilets; the other is cracked screens.

I’ve never done the former, but when I read the story, I remembered that like almost half of the subject’s clients, I too have cracked the screen on my iPhone.

The price for replacing an iPhone screen was listed in the story as $100, which is just about what I guessed it would cost. Except that I’d all but forgotten my screen was cracked. It happened in late November, and although I briefly contemplated having it repaired at the time, I realized yesterday that the whole idea of fixing it, and in fact the whole idea that I’d broken it, had all but disappeared from my radar in the nearly three months since.

The damage isn’t particularly inconveniencing. It’s a cobweb break that starts in the upper lefthand corner of the screen with a concentrated cluster of cracks; one runs horizontally across the upper part of the screen and one extends about halfway down the left edge, but none of it interferes significantly with visibility of the screen.

Ultimately, though, I don’t really think it’s either the thought of spending $100 or the fact that the cracks aren’t much of an inconvenience that keeps me from seeking out a repair. I think it may be that on some level, the fact that I broke the screen just two weeks after getting the phone serves as a reminder of something important to me: a reminder not to try to juggle too much at once: a reminder to pay attention and be attentive to whatever is in my hands, literally or figuratively.

On the rare occasions that someone sees my cracked screen and asks what happened, I usually hasten to explain that it wasn’t entirely the result of my own carelessness. I was a new iPhone user and was out running with a podcast playing and the NikePlus pedometer app running at the same time. And then the phone rang. That in itself might have been a problem already – I’m not sure I could have taken the phone out of my armband while I was running and answered it without dropping it – but there were even more mitigating factors: there was a message on the screen saying I had to click “Pause Nike Plus” or “Ignore phone call” before I could continue with either one. I got distracted and bogged down in the details, and that was what caused me to drop my phone, and that’s how the screen broke.

But I don’t even completely blame myself. It was a Saturday morning and Tim had called me three different times in the course of my five-mile run. My kids seldom call me at all while I’m out running, but he wanted to make waffles for an overnight guest and needed quite a lot of guidance, as it turned out. So I tend to assign some of the blame to Tim and his waffle-making shortcomings.

Really, though, it’s a story of my own carelessness and, more importantly, my lack of ability to prioritize. The podcast; the pedometer; the phone call; the run: it was just too much for me to integrate seamlessly, and so something broke in the process. Shortly after that, I started using a wristband pedometer instead of the Nike Plus app, and I learned to answer the phone without taking it out of the armband if it does happen to ring while I’m running. These are arcane adjustments, but it was a way of addressing information overload that took care of a trivial but still relevant problem.

Maybe I will get the screen fixed eventually. But I don’t know that I’ll do it any time soon. In the bulls-eye shape of the cracks on my screen is a message: slow down, stay focused, stop going off in so many directions at once. It’s a good lesson for me to remember, and so having it reinforced every time I look at my screen seems, by and large, like a very good thing.

Peer pressure? There's an app for that!

Occasionally, when I receive text messages from my son asking me to pick him up at the bus stop a quarter-mile from home because it’s cold and snowy, I’m tempted to tell him that when I was his age I had no cell phone and had to just hope my mother would happen to drive by as I reached the bus stop. It’s the circa 2010 version of “When I was your age, I walked five miles to school in a raging blizzard every day.”

But in general, most of the technological innovations that my kids take for granted seem like nothing but progress to me. I like the fact that we receive emails when there’s a snow cancellation rather than sitting by the radio for a half-hour listening to the alphabetical listing of towns. I like that my kids can stream pre-approved movies via Netflix rather than just flipping on the TV and watching whatever’s airing. I also appreciate the fact that since my 12-year-old has a cell phone, he and I don’t squander time searching each other out at dusk after an extracurricular activity on the school campus. If he exits the building after a sports practice or club meeting and doesn’t see me, he calls or texts and I tell him where I am. It’s that easy.

But yesterday I finally came face-to-face with an innovation that made me feel like the crotchety old grandfather saying “In my day, we used to...”

In this case, it’s this, assuming “my day” was any segment of my adulthood up to and including the present: In my day, when a group of friends wanted to go out to eat, we would discuss who wanted to go where and make the decision based on majority rule, proximity of the location, lobbying efforts, or any of a number of other factors. In my day, when the family had the opportunity to go on vacation, we asked other people for suggestions, read travel articles, and thought about the places we’d heard of that tempted us. In my day, we used our analytical skills and judgment to decide whether or not we felt like seeing a movie.

Not anymore, thanks to a brand new iPhone app called Cloudy. As Cloudy’s ad copy puts it, “Need help making a decision? Let your friends decide for you! Cloudy lets you quickly and easily ask groups of friends for their opinions....Pick friends from your contacts...and Cloudy will text them your question. Cloudy displays the responses to your yes/no and multiple-choice questions, and allows you to easily send your decision back to your friends. So go ahead - let your friends decide!”

So much for the heretofore all-purpose “If all your friends decided to jump off a bridge, would you?” approach to negating peer pressure. Now there’s an app that actually promotes letting your friends decide what you should do!

I understand that Cloudy isn’t presumably intended for pre-teens. It’s an iPhone app, and iPhones are still primarily the domain of adults. But our kids generally end up using the technology we rely on, and I worry about the inferences they will draw. Imagine growing up never having to negotiate with friends over whose turn it was to decide what game to play or try to persuade your parents that a ski vacation was a way better idea than a tropical getaway. Worse, imagine not knowing that decisions like that could be worked out by persuasion, debate, passion, manipulation, emotional blackmail – any number of tactics both positive and negative that most of us develop over the course of many decades of group decision-making.

I don’t mean to suggest that I’m immune to the value of online tools that help groups make decisions. When I was hosting the annual holiday cookie exchange party last December, my friend Mollie introduced me to a terrifically helpful tool called doodle.com that enabled each guest to cast a vote for which date we should hold it.

As I sat back and watched the choices tally themselves, I was delighted to be required only to send out the final consensus – “Wednesday the 14th it is!” – rather than have to take responsibility for decisions like whether a fourth grade band concert was more or less critical than a volunteer firefighter training session, or whether it was more important to me to have the close friend who makes mediocre holiday cookies attend versus the new acquaintance who has a degree in pastry science.

Yes, there are definitely times when it’s wonderful to turn the process of making a judgment call over to an algorithm. But I do hope the new Cloudy app doesn’t take over the world too quickly. My kids still need to learn that sometimes you still have to weigh the pros and cons – no matter whether the decision in question is sushi versus barbeque or sleepaway drama camp versus accelerated pre-calculus summer school – and call it as you see it. In your heart, not on your screen.

Coveting thy neighbor's Netbook, iPhone and wardrobe

Sometimes it’s hard not to covet, and other times I feel like I go the other extreme and use anti-materialism as an excuse for being negligent or sloppy. Often I’m not sure where the middle ground is.

As far as coveting, I have gadgety tendencies and find it easy to desire those electronics and office accessories that seem to make life easier. I’m the only person I know – well, not the only person, but the only 40-something semi-professional in Carlisle – who doesn’t have a cell phone that can do more than just call people, and I’m the only serious writer I know who doesn’t have a Netbook. One evening last week, I was feeling covetous and fell into a long contemplation on which I would rather have: an iPhone or a Netbook. With a Netbook, I could write and have web access even when I was away from my home office. Currently I have a little Alphasmart, which is a portable word processor that can store a few files and then sync up to my computer. This is enough to enable me to draft documents when I’m away from home; it’s just that the small screen prevents me from doing much revising.

Then I thought about the iPhone. With an iPhone, I could email or look things up on the web from anywhere, though that wouldn’t expand my portable writing options much. I covet both; I couldn’t decide which would help me more in the long run.

But after spending a couple of hours not only thinking about iPhones and Netbooks but even doing some online “window shopping” (screen shopping?), I woke up the next day thinking I didn’t really need either one that much. The fact is, I can write when I’m away from home – whether at Starbucks for the afternoon or on a weekend getaway or even in the car while Rick is driving – on my Alphasmart, and I’m not convinced that having constant portable access to email, Twitter or other internet functions would actually be a good thing for me. Sometimes, walking away from my desktop computer and over to where other activities are going on – such as where the kids are playing, or into the kitchen where I should be preparing dinner – is the most effective way for me to switch my concentration away from work and on to other equally important things. With portable email, I fear I’d be one of those people who Never Stops Checking, and the fact is, I’m not someone who gets constant emails or tweets or instant messages. Maybe having more access to email would only serve to underscore the occasional sense that I’m not in very high demand.

I covet electronics, and I also covet clothes. It seems everything I own right now is at least four years old and doesn’t fit me very well anymore; and yet now that I work from home and hang in not-very-fashion-conscious social circles, I can’t justify to myself the need to buy more clothes, or accessories, or jewelry. So instead I try to affirm the positive value of being minimalist; I tell myself not acquiring a lot is a positive thing; it’s good to be light on one’s feet and not carry a lot of clutter on one’s person or in one’s household.

At the same time, it’s possible to be too minimalist. I feel a certain disdain for people who find it too easy to disregard style, in terms of their clothing or their home. The world is, after all, full of beautiful things for the body and the home; to appreciate them is part of cultivating an aesthetic sense. I admire those people whose beautifully decorated homes reflect not the message that they can afford to buy a lot but that they possess inherent artistic style. It’s easy for me to say “Oh, I’m a minimalist, I do well with clean lines and a lot of open space in my home rather than a lot of knickknacks,” but the reality is that I’m not very good at choosing things for my home, even things that might enhance those clean lines and sunny spaces. Sometimes it seems to me it’s almost too easy to be anti-materialist; it becomes an excuse for not even trying to appreciate things of aesthetic value.

So for today, I’m writing on my portable word processor at the indoor pool while the kids swim, unable to indulge in the distraction of checking email or Twitter. Back home, my bedroom is, at the moment, neat but not overly accessorized. My clothes for today are very plain but clean and undamaged. I’ll just tell myself that I’m doing fine, in my minimalist way, and leave the tabletop candles, the trendy jewelry and the newest seasonal fashions -- along with the latest electronics -- to those who can pull them off in a way that I don’t seem able to do.