Living up to deadlines.

It’s odd, I don’t usually think of deadlines as something to live up to.

I also don’t usually think of the day as being over at midnight, but that seems like a possibly specious distinction to work with at the moment, so I’m here again, composing on my phone. I’ve set it to vibrate, which is slightly less annoying than clicking for Sudoku, but I am finding it a bit buzzy for typing.

It’s occurring to me that I have a lot of electronic wafers–little slices of screen and plastic and buttons that exist as ways to get to something else that isn’t exactly tangible. My Kobo. My laptop. This phone.

I say, sometimes, that I love living in the future. Usually I say it when John tells me something new and wonderful about technology or medicine or astronomy. But I think the first time I really noticed was several years ago…

I was watching the realtime map for the London Underground, and some of the stations lit up (means there was a service interruption). I was curious and clicked for details, and it said there’d been an incident on the tracks with a passenger. The timestamp was seven minutes old.

Someone got onto the Tube tracks in London and I found out about it in seven minutes. I can’t walk a mile in seven minutes, and…how far away is London? How many people do I know who’ve never even seen it? And I’m getting news from there in less time than it takes to drink a coffee, unless you really chug it.

(Full disclosure; I am a slow coffee drinker.)

((Fuller disclosure; I had a morbid streak when I was younger, and my second thought upon seeing the map information was “I wonder how far he splashed.” Which is ridiculous, really, I don’t even know that anyone was hurt rather than just being a Gap-hopping twit, but… Oh, the lurid imaginations of youth.))

I think the second time the shrinking of intervening distances really hit me was several years later, when a friend in the UK had forgotten his wallet at work and didn’t have groceries in the house and I ordered him a pizza. Because Internet. You can do a lot with the Internet.

Have noticed a possible downside to composing on the phone; small screen means it’s harder to glance back up at what I said earlier, and easier to ramble very far afield. Will mind that in future. Of course, it’s also easier to not get bogged down in going back and editing yourself, which is something I’ve been hoping to work on for a bit.

Right. Been writing for half an hour, and want to get up early tomorrow. Think I will call it a night.

I could be anywhere, and still be here.

Writing this from my new phone. Very different feeling from typing on a keyboard; I’m not sure how well I could write fiction on this. Maybe it’ll be different once I get more used to it and the motions become more of a reflex. I’ve never heard of anyone saying that they couldn’t write if they had to type, after all, and I guess this is similar.

Missed the bus this morning–it came a minute early–and John gave me a lift to the Transitway. Confess I was grinning like an idiot over being able to text him from the bus. Currently still playing around; I think the biggest difference between this and a typewriter is the inability to touch-type.

More later. Probably need to decide if those 200 words a day can be in separate posts.