I frequently exasperate people when I refer to anything from the 1970s as “vintage.”
I’m sorry, but I was born in 1983 and reached consciousness in the 1990s. Until my dying day, the America I romanticize will remain an America led by Bill Clinton, fed on Pizza Hut and Betty Crocker while wearing bootcut jeans and listening to Third Eye Blind. Oh yeah, and with “amber waves of grain” or something.
I kind of remember life before the Internet, but apparently there wasn’t much worth remembering. My mom was unable to blog about my first steps, words, teeth, bra… I guess people referred to phone books to look up business or home phone numbers. They made phone calls to book flights. They just went to the store to buy whatever they needed.
But I wasn’t kidding when I spent months over the summer looking for my first apartment in NYC, spending weeks of those months breathlessly schlepping through the entire borough of Manhattan with my poor, heat exhausted dad and asked, “How did people find places to live BEFORE Craigslist?”
It was hard enough to find a decent place WITH Craigslist.
I imagined that back in the olden days before the Internet, most people were born and died within the confines of the same apartment walls. Your home was your caste, unless you were incredibly ambitious and had lots of time on your hands, because moving was El Dolor En Su Ass Numero Uno. And then if you found a new place, upon the planets aligning just so, how did you find someone to move your stuff? Did businesses pick up the phones back then? Whoa. It’s hard to imagine.
How did people move from Texas to NYC before the Internet? Or before the Internet and nationwide long-distance on cell phones? I imagine some bow-legged cowboy type shuffling around with a big carboard box amongst the darkly clothed city slickers. (Without the Internet’s ability to proliferate trends and culture, there would be an even greater style divide in this country. In fact, stirrup pants would still be en vogue as business casual dress throughout the Bible Belt). The cowboy would huddle in his improvised new twist on the mobile home, alley-hopping until he found a really unconvincing and inauthentic barbeque restaurant dumpster.
My point: There are so many things we do now on the Internet - banking, commerce, apartment hunting, pizza ordering, corresponding… I can’t imagine life without it. I spend so much time each week reading, researching, and writing online. I don’t ever track flights, packages, or my bank accounts online, but I could, and I could do it religiously.
Today, I realized a new tracking capability. I can look up my account at the New York Public Library website and see which books I placed on hold are in transit. I actually know four books that are being sent from libraries in other boroughs to my library in Morningside Heights. I’m so excited! I imagine my four books rubber banded together, jostling in a large, white van. They come from Staten Island and Brooklyn and some tiny library tucked on the corner of a Lower East Side street.
They are my tired, my poor, my huddled masses. And they never would have met, never would have arrived on a shelf together in Morningside Heights with a piece of paper with the first three letters of my last name binding them, had it not been for the Internet. Or Craigslist. Or Third Eye Blind, by God.
I click my mouse beside the golden search engine.
