The downside of being a person who writes everything down is that you end up with scraps of paper and half done lists everywhere…in your wallet, your pockets, the dashboard of your car, your nightstand, and so on. Sooner or later you lose an important note or double book yourself because you forgot to check all eight appointment books (an exaggeration to prove a point…I've never had eight appointment books) or send one of your best ideas through the washing machine because you left the scrap of paper in your jeans. Having had just about all these things happen to me in the last couple months, I thought maybe it was time to step tentatively into the 21st Century and get me one of them new-fangled gadgets called a PDA - Personal Digital Assistant, better known as the Palm Pilot.

I asked my friend Dan (who is my resident "Oh you need something? I got a guy"guy) to see if he could swing me a deal through one of his connections. Before I fully adjusted to the idea, he showed up at my office door with a mostly new Palm Pilot in his hands for little old me. (Incidentally, this was very swell of him and I sure appreciate it a lot. Most of my money is tied up in diapers right now so it's not often I decide to get a non-essential item and actually follow through with it…thanks Dan!)

Before I go any further, let me say that I fully acknowledge that the Palm Pilot is basically the 21st Century equivalent of the pocket protector. Sure it's electronic and it beeps and has a little screen on it and everyone seems to have them now…but for me nothing sets off the geek alarm faster than a grown person who's more attached to some little tech gizmo than my four-year old is to his trusty blankie. That said, I think I'm at the point in my life now where I'm secure enough to make the leap. Plus, I don't ever expect to be so attached to the damn thing that I pull it out at dinner or in a bar or something…so maybe that'll keep my geek reading low...or at least not much higher than it already is.

In the week I've had the thing, I've figured out how to handle your basic "make appointments, make to do lists, and save contact information" functions without too much trouble. I'm sure I'll probably never figure out everything you can do with a Palm Pilot, but you know, I'm okay with that. As long as it keeps track of the stuff I want it to keep track of I'm not too worried about the add-on software that allows your Palm to make you waffles every morning or rotate your tires or whatever. Besides, I'm sure my man Dan "has a guy" who can do those things for me anyway.

During the same week in which I made the leap into "Palm World" (which sounds sorta like a new reality show or something doesn't it? Probably something on the Fox Network if I had to guess….) I heard a news story about wireless internet access in, of all places, 3 Com Park, which is where the San Francisco Giants play baseball. The premise is interesting in one of those quasi-Orwellian you-can't-stop-progress kind of ways and I imagine in the near future it'll seem normal to us that half of the fans at a baseball game are surfing the web despite plunking down seventy-five bucks a ticket to sit five rows off the field. Granted, baseball can be kind of slow at times so if this idea is going to catch on in any professional sports stadium, baseball seems the best candidate.

So anyway…I'm thinking about wireless internet at baseball games, and lap-top computers, and portable DVD players, and cell phones, and Palm Pilots, and twenty-four hour bank machines, and twenty-four hour grocery stores, and exercise clubs that are open every day of the year and all of a sudden I just feel sort of overwhelmed by it all. Like many of the things I just mentioned, they are probably meant to make life more convenient for us, but in fact all they really do is make us all busier.

I have a friend who lived in Europe for a while and said that while he loved being there, he grew increasingly frustrated with pubs that closed at 11 p.m., and banks that weren't open past 4 p.m., and grocery stores that closed at 8 p.m. I asked him why, and he said, "Because I don't want to have to re-adjust my life to do any of these things, I want to be able to do them whenever I want to. When it's convenient for me".

And I agree, he's got a point there. Albeit a very American sort of point…but sometimes it seems to me like life is already too busy and too complicated as it is. How did we ever manage to live without all these things that supposedly make our lives simpler and more enjoyable? Cell phones, answering machines, 400 TV channels, bank machines, TiVo and so on and so on. I think the answer is that we did just fine. And we probably all lived a little bit slower, and with less distraction, less things pulling us in so many different directions. Or maybe we, as people, have always found a way to fill that available time…just as we continue to fill it, and overfill it, even today as we all face the challenge of having less and less of it to fill.

But maybe, just maybe, when we didn't have so many gadgets filling up our lives, maybe we had a little more time for each other, for our neighbors, for our communities, for our families and for our friends. A little more time to relax and watch the world go by and being okay with that sometimes. Knowing that the world would be waiting whenever we wanted to jump back in.

I've been accused of being nostalgic, of being a sentimentalist on more than one occasion. And along with my tendency to make lists, I'm pretty much okay with that too. I know I'm not going to stop the great march forward and I'm not even saying that I necessarily want to. I guess I'm just hoping that we all remember gadgets and gizmos are just that, gadgets and gizmos. Wires and circuits and buttons and whatever else makes them up. They're definitely a part of life these days. But they're not life itself, and they aren't a substitute for shaking someone's hand, or kissing your children, or hugging an old friend you haven't seen in a long time. There is no substitute for any of those things. And if we ever try to create a substitute for them, that'll be the first signal that the human race really has drifted off course.

Shake a hand, kiss your kids, hug a friend. I think I'll add those 3 things to my latest to-do list. All I have to do is enter them in my Palm Pilot.

All the best,
Mike Casey
On-Air Mountain Guide
9a-2p