Daily writing prompt

What is the most important thing to carry with you all the time?

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NOTE: This answer is coming from someone from a highly technological culture.

I considered at first answering this question metaphorically, with something like “your attitude”, but dismissed that as coy. I decided I would answer this prosaically, with the one item I never leave the house without — my smartphone.

Smartphones have become so ubiquitous that grammar guides have shortened the name to just “phones” as if landline phones no longer exist. As a typical member of Generation Jones, I was a relative latecomer to the cutting the cord and ditching the landline. Today, one’s smartphone is just “the phone”.

A smartphone is necessary for quick action during emergencies, and a way to share last words in a shooter situation. It serves as a resource during travel, to find food and lodging in the middle of a road trip. I was in a van for a long ride home this week when our engine had trouble. We located a town with a repair service near us in minutes and a hotel down the road that night when our plans changed. What a change from drifting through towns looking for service.

A smartphone also answers questions with a rapidity not seen in the reference library days. There is still a purpose to reference libraries, who filter out questionable sources (scams, lies, slanted coverage) as a matter of course. But to someone trained to judge information, the Internet is a speedy source of information to answer questions like “What bird did I just see?” or “Who won the World Series in 2016?” (for the latter, it was the Chicago Cubs.) The smartphone is a tiny but mighty Internet portal.

I haven’t addressed the use of a smartphone to access music or books. With a subscription, one has access to whole eras of music. Whether a private library on Kindle or a public one on Libby, one has access to an entire library. That alone may be enough for me to keep my phone handy.

If I left my keys at home, I wouldn’t be able to drive. If I left my smartphone at home, I would be stranded in an info stream without a boat.

I try to write, or at least do something that pertains to writing, every day. Writing, like any flow activity, gives me joy.

I love playing with words, finding the right words, using my skills to eliminate extraneous words. I love using special words, exact words. Creating worlds, making characters realistic, building conversations — all of these are parts of writing.

Sometimes it’s challenging to build in writing time. In the summer, where I have responsibilities but freedom in scheduling them, I have written daily after my daily “day job” tasks. So after I have worked on my new class for the day, and after grading for my internship class, I have time to write. This fall (which starts in a couple of weeks for me), I will not have that early afternoon time. So most days, I can write after work; other times it will have to be early evening. But it’s important that I write, because I need a little joy every day.

I was born with an exceptional amount of curiosity. An inconvenient amount, in fact. When I was a child, I had to be shamed into not asking personal questions or snooping in drawers. Luckily, I have grown up to constrain myself from my urge to know.

And I do have an urge to know everything. Curiosity is just one of the tools we have to learn about the world, and it’s a great thing for scientific inquiry. But my curiosity about the minutiae of daily life could get annoying quickly, particularly when it comes to medical stuff.

For example, I read the obituaries trying to find out how people died. Memorials provide this information, unless the family of the deceased want memorials to be given to the Humane Society or the decedent’s Alma mater, in which case my inquisitiveness is frustrated.

I am a frequent victim of clickbait. A headline like “Hollywood Star Falls Victim to Rare Disease”? I don’t know who the Hollywood star is, nor care, but I want to know all about the disease. I admit that ordinary gossip does little for me, but that rare disease? I’m there. (Note: it’s usually something like diabetes, not a rare disease.)

I resist the more rude parts of my curiosity, like asking someone why they went to the hospital. But I am forever, embarrassingly curious.

Sometimes my curiosity has its benefits. I am on my first day of moulage for New York Hope, making people up to look like human casualties of an inland hurricane. It helps to know what an open fracture, a bruised spleen, or a case of cholera look like from the outside. I’d show you a picture, but we’d have some people getting ill.