Why am I waking up so early?

This morning, I found myself wide awake at 5 AM.  Don was awake, too, and we chatted a bit. The thing is, Don can go back to sleep easily. I can’t.

So here I sit, with stingy eyes and caffeine chugging through my body, wondering if I can get a nap in later in the day. I swear, I haven’t had a good night’s sleep for a week.

The new, slightly-ill-fitting-but-it-will-do-slipcover. In fact, it’s more than slightly ill-fitting. In a perfect world, I would tackle this project and make a slipcover. I tried to once and ran screaming out of the room. Besides, this chair is old and on its last legs, so why bother?

We were watching television last night and found a channel that had very, very old black & white television programs: The Jack Benny Show, The Goldbergs and Dinah Shore.

We were enthralled.

There’s an aura of timelessness about them. And a simplicity that I yearn for sometimes. The Goldbergs was amazing – like a teleplay – a live broadcast, start to finish. At one point, a cameraman goofed up a shot, one of the actors flubbed a line and they kept right on going. As a theater person, this warms my heart. Because they couldn’t rely on retakes, they had to do it. Live. And improvise if they screwed up.

Dinah Shore sang a long, complicated medley with Ella Fitzgerald. Tough stuff, musically. They had to really be on their game. No auto-tune. No retake. No relying on special effects and lots of loud noise in the background. Just a piano and their incredible voices.

What passes for talent nowadays often isn’t.

Do you ever yearn for a simpler time?

The Model T was my dad’s toy. The paint has chipped. It was well-loved. When my dad sees it, does he wish for a simpler time?

I bet he does. I sure do.

I have a twitter account and use it every once in a while, but frankly, it’s hard to keep up with everything. Blogging daily, thinking of and writing posts, taking pictures, checking Facebook, the occasional tweet, thinking about my future Etsy shop, making a website for my theater work, should I join Linked In, what about Google+?

I don’t want to sound like one of those people who say, “When I was a girl, we had to…” We had to, what? Walk to school? Yes, over a mile and no school bus deposited me right at my door. Use our imaginations? Yes. No computers, no computer games, no X box, no texting. Just me, a doll or two, or a cardboard box, or the world outside my front door. Read? Yes, for hours. No technical-age distractions. Just a book and my imagination. Have conversations face-to-face? Yes. Of course, there was the phone, but for the most part conversation involved sitting with someone and looking them in the eye and talking. No hiding behind an email or a text. Television? 3 major networks. No 24/7 news stations. No reality shows. No endless news cycle that results in a lot of misinformation. Rather, a sense of a larger community sitting down to watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, or tuning into Dinah Shore or Bonanza.

It’s a mixed blessing, this world of ours. On one hand, I wouldn’t be writing this blog without the incredible technical innovations of recent years. I wouldn’t have met all of you. I couldn’t google something at the drop of a hat. So much that used to take a chunk of time, doesn’t anymore. On the other hand, what have we lost?

A friend of mine who teaches theater on a university level tells me that she sees a real difference in today’s students. Their brains are wired differently. They can’t concentrate for very long on a task. They don’t know what to do without their cell phones. They don’t know how to write. They don’t know how to memorize. She’s actually including a segment this coming semester on how to memorize lines. Pretty essential for a drama student, wouldn’t you say?

I love my iPhone and my laptop and my digital camera. They have become a part of my daily life. Certainly this blog wouldn’t exist without the computer and the camera. But yet another networking site? And I now have to keep track of tweets? I know Social Media is highly recommended to get your blog out there, but the very thought leaves me exhausted.

I don’t know.

What do you think about all this? Too much technology? Too little? Is there such a thing as a simpler time? How do you balance all of this? Don says that he sometimes feels out of the loop because he wants to maintain some distance from all of this. Yet, he wants to be in the loop. But how do you stay in the loop and still lead a life that is filled with quiet, meditative moments, time for the imagination to soar, time for good conversation?

Your thoughts?