Paper or...?

At the grocery store, or at my grocery store at least, they have stopped asking me if I prefer paper or plastic. We default to plastic unless I remember to say something before the groceries start their interminable beep, beep, beep across the register. I never remember.

Which is really too bad, because I do prefer paper. While plastic grocery bags are good for one thing (bagging kitty litter), paper grocery bags are multi-functional. And recyclable. In the world of groceries, as in so many other places, paper is just... better. And yet we fail to give it its due.

Take planners as another example. The most 21st-century of us can decide between our do-it-all, know-it-all phones for calendar purposes, or our tablets (I don't actually have one of those), or our computers. Most computers come with some kind of calendar program, and if not, there is always the all-knowing, all-seeing Google.

I have both a know-it-all phone (which I like) and an all-knowing Google account (which I love), but I am successful in using neither to keep track of my life. When I finally upgraded to my current phone from my dumbphone, I decided to make an effort to consolidate: I stopped carrying around my annual Moleskine planner. I always had the double-spread weekly view, with one page showing the days of the week and the other a blank lined page for my listmaking activities. Now I have iCal. And Evernote. I have synced my work calendar with my personal calendar (a depressing thought, actually), and my work to-dos have their own notebook within the Evernote app, while my personal to-dos have yet another, and so on.

And I hate it. I have been doing this for over six months because this is the generation we live in, this generation of consolidating, of tools that can do anything and everything, of combining our work lives and our personal lives. But I cannot catalog my life on a screen. I cannot relate to it, I do not complete my lists, and I never check for appointments before making a new one.

I am now actively searching for a new paper planner for 2012, one in which I can scribble notes to myself, and make weekend honey-do lists, and keep a copy of my 26 by 26 list on hand. I will continue to use my smartphone for work, where I live in a world of technology and ever-changing schedules, calendars, and due dates, but for me, and my own life, I will remain on paper until they stop printing paper planners.