All the News...

Tomorrow is the last day that a paper copy of the New York Times will arrive at my house.

I give that sentence its very own paragraph to underscore what a profound change this will be for me (and, well, to add some theatricality to the whole thing). For the last ten years, my father has given me a subscription as a gift - a long time to give any gift to anyone, let alone such an expensive gift, let alone to your, er, adult child. So. I completely understand that this had to end; in the past year, as he's moved from a job at the NYT itself to a copy editor position at a small paper in Rhode Island, I've reminded him several times that he no longer has to foot this bill.

But this is a man who has been a journalist his whole adult life, who has news paper ingrained in him the way some people have the union ethos or lighthouse keeping (OK, maybe that last one is a stretch). When he's on a trip, he buys the local newspaper, even if it's the Wretched City Urinal, even if the headline writing kills him, even if he finds the thing loaded with, insult of insults, "non-stories." It's as much a testament to his traditional view of how one ideally gets the news as to his love for me that he held out on cancellation for so long.

And it's an ideal that he passed on to me. If I were a typical early-30-something, I would have preferred to access my news digitally all along. But I'm an outlier. I do read websites, I have listened to podcasts, I pay some bills electronically, I write - gasp! - a blog. But I'm also that person on the bus who's filling out her rent check while trying to keep the Arts and Business sections from sliding off her lap to the floor.

It would be one thing if I were just embracing my inner grandma. But I find that looking at a screen for too long or listening to the radio without having an activity to do irritates me. And when there's technology that I don't understand, I'm just as liable to abandon it as I am to try to adapt to it. (My friend calls this falling into an Amish black hole...which is maybe name enough for this phenomenon. She is the funniest). Case in point: my laptop "died" three years ago. Why do I put died in quotes? Because I never actually brought the thing in to get diagnosed. For all I know the light is dead and the motherboard is fine.

So I'm nervous about staying as informed through the radio and Internet, but instead of, oh I don't know, swiping the neighbors' copy from their driveway on my way to work, I'm going to try to change my habits. I've already been checking the Seattle Times and other news websites almost daily for (ahem) a few months - I can add one more (though only to the tune of 20 articles a month for now). And when I move to a college town for grad school soon, I'm going to look into delivery rates for the local paper.

I don't have to completely reject being my father's daughter.