Pasting and Publishing

I am writing this post as I sit at my brother’s piano lesson, waiting for my turn. No, I don’t have a laptop. I didn’t even bring pen and paper. I’m typing this into my TI-83+ graphing calculator. I’ll then load the text onto my computer and post it from there. This is how pathetic I’ve become.

That’s the problem with parentally restricted Internet access: you can’t afford to spend time typing while you’re online. As such, I type all of my blog posts and most of my longer outgoing emails in advance. When the time comes that I am finally online, I simply copy, paste, and send (or in the case of this blog, publish).

Yet, I can’t help but feel guilty about pasting. It seems like I’m being impersonal and that I’m somehow removing myself from what I’ve written. I feel like I’m just passing along a meaningless block of text that no one cares about anyway.

But it’s not like I am being impersonal; I’ve really put some thought and consideration into what I’ve written. It’s just that it seems too easy to write an email at night, save it to a disk and simply paste and send when I get to school the next morning. I feel like I’m missing the actual act of typing what I’ve sent, even though I’m not because I’ve already done it.

As for blogging, I don’t really care. With other websites I’ve run (and continue to run), I do everything offline and just upload it all at once. For a website, even a blog, it just seems natural to do it offline. It’s just for email that I feel I should be more active in actually typing my messages right before I send them. Maybe it has to do with the timeliness of the whole thing. I don’t know. All I know is my days of pasting and publishing are all but over.