This last week of June, my parents and I spent four days driving to and from Canada, and five beautiful days in it relishing time with extended family. This was it: the last time I’ll ever experience a true 20th-century style road trip. No more toggling between devices for cameras, texts, and wifi. No more taking screen shots of directions in between Canadian prairies. No more being temporarily yet unequivocally unavailable for the weekend because I’m in a heavenly house in the Canadian boonies where wireless connections nonexist and cell reception is bad.

     Remember even longer ago, before this? Remember huge atlases in the glove compartment with states spread across a page or two across your lap, rather than just an inch or two in your palm? Remember having the job of totaling up mileages between cities from the little blue numbers printed along the highways? Remember calculating approximate arrival times based on roadside signs? Remember the uncertainty of pulling in somewhere in the middle of the night and bopping from establishment to establishment because the rodeo was in town, and you had no other way of knowing the price and availability of local rooms?

     Tomorrow I go to T Mobile to sign the next two years of my life away so I can pay for a device that I’ve survived until now without. Truth be told, I’m slightly worried that I won’t be able to survive without my other three cracked, dated phone-oids. They have served as a sort of crutch for me in dealing with my codependency on the virtual social world. I’m slightly dreading the one small step/one giant leap into the 21st century. I think it has a lot to do with how much I love being unreachable. You know when a girl kind of likes having a long distance boyfriend? Well, I kind of like having long distance everything–long distance employers most of all.

     Excuse this annoyingly pious, hopelessly hypocritical diatribe in the beloved religious tradition of the internet. I’m hoping that I can take forward with me the general sense I’ve had on this trip of living a lifestyle I don’t usually partake in anymore: the one where I’m only fully concerned with the people in my immediate vicinity. The people I love deeply who are spread all around the world do a great job of making up for the other hundreds of people that I really don’t need to get personal updates from who also populate my cyber community, but the latter do such a good job of shattering my dearly precious and already jeopardized attention that I cherish the chance to ignore them for even just 48 hours at a time. Of course, I miss hearing how my people’s days were, and I love seeing stunning photos from places I’m not and will never be, but I still feel an acute dampening of my spirits when I click on the link about Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston’s vacation in Rome (do I care? If so, why?), or find out about heart- and earth-breaking news via an Instagram post. With the inauguration of this site, and my desire to put effort into making something nice, I also plan to actively shave away the time I spend overdosing on blue light from tiny portals into the world and build up the time I spend just looking out the window at Wyoming, which is actually very worth looking at, as I only recently discovered.