Dinner is warming on the woodstove. I sit at my desk in a moth-eaten wool skirt I mended this morning with some scraps of embroidery floss. According to my 1940s Seiko wristwatch, it’s about 20 minutes past 4 o’clock in the afternoon as I compose this column by candlelight on my trusty Royal typewriter — the one with the broken “e” key.
Welcome to my analog new year. The one where I sever all ties to my former digital self.
About that Zoom meeting, boss. Sadly, this commitment means I won’t be logging on today or any day going forward. I mean, let’s not go crazy — I’ll still work from home. But I’ll be sending my copy the old fashioned way — the U.S. mail. You should have it in about five to seven days. Be on the lookout for a vintage postcard with a picture of a squirrel waterskiing on Lake George and an interdepartmental envelope with a string and button closure that made its last rounds in 1992.
I’ve deactivated my Instagram and replaced it with about a dozen rolls of Kodak Instamatic film I had developed at a Fotomat in Provo. Sorry, internet friends, but I won’t be sharing them anytime soon as they’ll be buried in a shoebox under my bed for the next 15 years.
Instead of social media, my vital life updates will now be shouted from my balcony to no one in particular. If you happen to be passing by on lower Park Avenue and you hear a woman yelling, “I woke up like this!” or “New glasses, who dis?” — a simple toot of the horn or thumbs up will make my day.
I hereby shut down my Strava so I can record every workout and ski run into muscle memory instead. From now on, activity will be monitored by my ongoing intake of Advil and CBD lotion. No kudos from the French guy I dated in 2018 who still checks my stats. The QOMs will be all me. The trophy? I lived to ski another day.
Books will be in paper form, hardcover only. No more passive listening. Reading will happen silently, one page at a time. Bonus points if the pages are yellow and smell like your grandfather’s basement after a flood. I saw a stat the other day: if you read even one book in 2026, you’ll have read more than 50% of Americans. Clearly, the bar for analog new year is about as low as it gets.
For navigation, I will no longer rely on the glowing Google maps I’ve heretofore blindly followed till they led me to the edge of a cliff in the San Rafael Swell. If you want to tell me how to get to your house, kindly eschew your compass. I’ll need turn-by-turn directions with landmarks — like “Pass the 7-Eleven on your left, turn right at the mailbox that got run over by the neighbor’s teenager and pull into the driveway next to the old PCMR lifties miner’s shack that just sold for $2.5 mill.”
Forget Spotify, AppleMusic or any of that. I recently purchased a dusty record player from the dollar room in the Christian Center. It came with a stack of vinyl that included a double-album set featuring a woman wearing cat glasses and a bouffant, holding a toy poodle, titled “Enter Me Lord,” by Mary Hinge.
I’m finally installing a landline into the old phone jack in my living room. It’s a red dial phone with a long cord — you know, the curly kind. I’m pretty sure I won’t be using it much since I have no idea what anyone’s actual phone number is and the last phone book I owned was in 2010.
I’ll also be reverting to my Catholic-school cursive handwriting. The swoopy, loopy L’s and the D that looks like an upside-down duck. As the nuns used to say, God help you if the spaces in between each word aren’t exactly the width of your pointer finger. These analog rituals were hard-earned and it would be a sin to let them go.
Multitasking looks different, too, in this analog new year. Now, I stir the soup and listen to the neighbor’s wind chimes. I read one sentence at a time and let it echo inside my head while I take a sip of French chardonnay. I knit a row and remember my grandma’s hands when she showed me how.
I know what you’re thinking. None of this can be real. We’ve gone too far to go all the way back. It’s just a nostalgic daydream. And, of course, you’re entitled to your own very stupid opinion. Just don’t post it on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn. Write a letter to someone who cares.