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I'll just look it up

Prior to hitting up the Trashcan Sinatras show, I was reminded of the difference between my generation and a younger generation's approach to technology.

As I've mentioned before, I love having my old bike and riding it. I had to get some new handlebar grips since the old ones had fallen apart. Figuring it would be easy to glide these rubber tubes on my bike, I didn't think of looking online about how to put them on. Why in the world would I stop and do that? Seemed like a no-brainer situation.

Well, after forming three blisters on my two hands (two of them were on my thumbs and they both formed and ripped off in the span of a few minutes), I was about to give up and try again the following morning. I sat down at my computer and typed in a few words with a Google search. Finding a video tutorial on the topic, I realized there was a secret: spray hairspray on the inside of the grip and the grip will easily slip on.

After grabbing a can of hairspray from Matt's bathroom, the process only took a couple of more tries, but I was successful mere minutes after the fact. I had to think about why I didn't look this up in the first place. I had never put grips on a bike before, but I'm not wired to resort to the Internet for answers on all things I didn't know yet.

A few weeks back, I teased a friend of mine (who's barely into his twenties) about how he resorts to his cell phone's wifi for information on almost anything. When telling him the general location of the bar we were going to later that night, he told me not to worry about telling him exact an street name or address. "I'll just look it up," he said as he gestured to his cell phone.

In response, I jokingly brought up the idea of looking for the meaning of life by looking that up online. He joked back that he had an app for that.

Maybe it's with people who had their first cell phones equipped with Internet or never knew what it was like to use a dial-up modem. As helpful as I find the Internet, I'm not so locked into it the notion that "my life" is stored on a device. The thing is a guide to me, pure and simple. Above all else, I'd prefer to learn from what I can from human interaction. For the rest, there's the Internet

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