Wooden pencils are inconvenient. If you break off the tip, you don't have that pencil until you dig around for a sharpener. The erasers are usually lower quality than mechanical pencils, and using them vigorously for even one or two words causes half of it to slough off, and soon you've got a dull-tipped pencil, grooves in the side where just a slight pressure of a fingernail broke through, the eraser worn down to nothing. You either have to carry a sharpener around with you or have a million pencils - and if you choose the latter, you will at some point have to take the time to sharpen all of them.
DVDs and CDs are inconvenient. Instead of just having the media on a computer, whether that be on an iTunes account, Amazon Prime, or just on the hard drive, you've got these cases and these discs that, if they break, you're out a movie or thirteen songs. VHS tapes and cassette tapes are even more inconvenient - you have to carry them around, they come unraveled if you leave them alone with a three-year-old for more than twenty seconds, and God help you find something to play them on.
Physical books are inconvenient. Instead of a Kindle (or, let's be real here, a Kindle app) that's got your entire library in one, lightweight tablet, you've got to choose one or two or however many you can fit in your bags or your arms to carry with you, they're heavy, and finding a comfortable way to read a mass-market paperback is nigh-impossible. They get ripped up and you spill stuff on them, and then they're not quite so pretty anymore.
But I like that. I like having to take the time to do things like sharpening pencils or deciding between forty CDs rather than be able to click and instantly have everything. I love having to sharpen pencils once a week, and you can get pencil-topper erasers. I love looking over my CD collection, and my DVD collection, and the the few cassettes and VHS tapes I own. I love books. I love physical books more than anything - while I do watch movies I don't own a physical copy of and listen to music off of Amazon prime if I'm already sitting at the computer, I just can't read a book on a screen. Lugging them around, having stacks of unread books pressed against the wall - and used books, with their bent spines and coffee spills and the occasional annotation, is my favorite thing.
With physical, inconvenient, and sometimes old-fashioned things, there's more thought behind it. It's more deliberate to pick out a CD before heading off to class or popping a DVD into the DVD player than it is to hit shuffle on an iPod or pick out a movie on Netflix, only to get bored every twenty seconds and go searching off for a new one. Everything that's deliberate, everything that you take a couple more seconds to think about, is everything that I kind of tend to live for.
Maybe it's just because I'm a material person. I like stuff, especially old stuff. Thrift stores are my wallet's biggest enemy - I've got a box of 'millennium bubbles' on my dresser right now because it's just so cool. I love collecting things, weird things, and so having fifty pencils with erasers in various stages of existence and a wall of unread books and a couple of CD racks are just kind of natural for me. It's tangible and it takes more time, but that's what I like. There's no point in rushing around, rushing to find this, rushing to click on this, and convenience sometimes goes too far. If everything's right there, there's... there's something a little less genuine about it. It's just less fun and real.
So if I have to take fifteen minutes out of every weekend to make sure that I'll have sharpened pencils come Monday morning, then that's pretty much fine with me.
