In a crazy burst of optimism, I have purchased another year of monthly day planners. (Yes, I plan my days by the month, a year at a time. Or: I plan my year in a monthly book of days, divided into an hourly grid.) I don't actually do any day planning in my day planner. I keep my calendar on my phone, as any sensible person would in the twenty-first century.

The only reason I ever started using a day planner was to keep track of my mileage. At one time, the Boss suggested that he might be willing to pay me a mileage fee for the use of my car for business purposes, so I started keeping careful track of all the miles I drove, and where I went and what I did. That lasted for a few weeks, until I realized that no mileage payments would be forthcoming. But for some reason, I kept writing down the mileage at the end of each day.

When I started all this, I kept track of my gas purchases as well, just in case he would decide to reimburse me that way. I also thought I might calculate how many miles I was getting to the gallon, for whatever unknown value that information might have. I still write down all the information on every trip to the gas station, but I've never once calculated mileage or done anything else with all those numbers.

So far, there's no real reason to keep lugging my day planner everywhere I go, and yet I bought another year's worth, taking me through September 2013. The one thing I do use it for is totally unrelated to anything. When I'm driving, I have the radio set to a station that plays an eclectic variety of music (it's The Loft on Sirius/XM). I'm never disappointed in the quality of the music on the station, and every so often I hear a song so new, so fresh, and so wonderful that I think I might want to buy it. So I write the title and artist's name in my day planner (usually after pulling over).

And I've filled many playlists on my phone with songs that I've bought after poring through my day planner, looking for the notes I've made. My life is filled with the music I've fallen in love with and wanted to hear on random play while I work. It's the one and only sole justification I can think of for continuing to buy and carry my day planner, and even that is outdated, since I could just pick up my phone and ask Siri to make a note of the songs I hear on the radio. But I'm old-fashioned, you know?

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What I'm not old-fashioned about is the format of the music I buy. I haven't purchased an entire CD in years, and I don't own machines that will play my old cassettes and LPs any more. The digital revolution might have its drawbacks, but the ability to buy one song at a time and have it available whenever and wherever I want to hear it makes all the rest worthwhile.