I, Robot?

I just got home from being re-Gumby-fied at the physical therapist’s (I can now reach halfway down my shins!). The weather is beautiful, and I took myself out for a big greasy lunch in Rhinebeck, so maybe it’s the extra endorphins flowing through my brain, but I’m feeling pretty good right now. Which is a rare elixir I want to bottle up and save for those days when I’m sucking down Motrin and pressing my nose up to the sliding glass door like a dog.

And although cholesterol and spring fever were clouding my head, over at ifreelance.com, where I’ve put up my cyber-shingle as a freelance writer (Opus Writes), I was not imagining this: an alert popped up that someone is asking for bids to write a romantic short story. Money to write fiction? Hot damn! During our writing group’s rambling sessions, this was a lifestyle we’d only dreamed of. Shrugging off our day jobs and getting paid to write fiction.

Of course I’d hoped to get paid for the writing first and then quit – gloriously, of course, and with a three-book deal to back me up…but life never does work out as you planned.

Anyway, I put in a bid. It’s my first and I hope I didn’t blow it. I’ll keep you posted.

The web site seems like a pretty cool idea. For a small fee either by the month or for the year, you can set up a profile, list your qualifications and skills, post your portfolio, then either cruise for projects that match your categories, or wait for alerts to come in via e-mail that match the kinds of things you write. Already I’ve nixed one project. Someone wanted three 150-175 page Word documents proofread, font-checked and indexed, all in one week for $300. Didn’t seem like something I could tackle in that time frame.

While the whole idea is pretty cool, this subject must be stuck in my craw this week, but it got me thinking yet again about how all this cyber-living is changing our lives.

Maybe about a year and a half ago, when I still had a full-time job, one day I buzzed through most of my morning without actually picking up a pen. I’d written that morning’s novel pages on the computer before leaving for work. Jotted down a grocery list on the Palm with a stylus while sitting in the car waiting for a train to pass. At work, voice mail messages were typed into the Palm software, priorities checked off on the electronic to-do list, e-mail messages were written and sent, spec sheets were commented upon as PDF files with sticky notes and e-mailed to the appropriate product engineer. And as I reached for my Pilot VBall to sign a birthday card for a co-worker (trivia note for my future fan club: this is the only pen Opus will write with), it just floored me that it was the first time I’d touched it all day.

Yesterday I had a similar feeling. While I did write in my journal with a pen, I then did a morning’s worth of work-type tasks: e-mailed some press releases I’d just drafted for my former boss, posted a few more writing samples to ifreelance.com, e-mailed a few resumes for opportunities that looked interesting…and didn’t realize until Husband woke up around 11:30 and stumbled into my writing room that he was the first human contact, in person or even on the phone, that I’d had all day.

It gave me the creeps. (and no, it wasn’t from Husband’s morning stubble) It made me want to strive to go anywhere, do anything…as long as I could see and hear people. Even if I didn’t talk to them. Just to see them. I went for a walk down a busy street. I went grocery shopping. I probably could have even gone to Wal-Mart, but common sense stopped me before I made that mistake.

In the early days of dot-coms and PayPal, pundits speculated that brick-and-mortar shopping was doomed. But I don’t think so. However technologically advanced we get, (it’s still pretty cool when the UPS man drives up with that box with the Amazon smile) but we are still human animals who crave the contact of other human animals. And I don’t know about you all, but I’m a tactile human animal and there are some things I can’t imagine buying on the web. I need to touch them, see them in person, see how the store is laid out. Books, OK. Bedding, clothes (unless I know the vendor), ladies’ unmentionables, forget about it.

I want to call customer service and get a live voice on the phone.

I want to give my money to a bank teller and get a smile in return.

I want some things to stay the same.

I’m only human, after all.

And if none of this makes sense today, I can blame it on spring fever. Or the grilled cheese with bacon.