There’s this saying: “The only constant is change.” So from horse carriages to driverless cars. From rotary phones to mobile phones that can do everything. From typewriters to desktops, laptops, and tablets.
I use my phone to write columns. But I’ve kept the family’s typewriters for nostalgia. We have the old ones—antique models up to the ’80s — and not the electronic kind.
There are trending videos of professionals daring artificial intelligence (AI) to replace them. Chefs, for example, can never be replaced by AI. But for how long will that “never” become “perhaps”? Only time will tell.
For now, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” learns to play her cards right by convincing someone to help her keep Runway magazine running on her terms. For a while there, that almost seemed impossible. But she’s a fictional character running a fictional magazine in a movie.
“The Devil Wears Prada” began as a 2003 novel by Lauren Weisberger, who once worked as a personal assistant to Anna Wintour of Vogue. Priestly is widely seen as inspired by Wintour. Fiction versus reality.
In 2006, the book was adapted into a film which, compared with this year’s sequel, was the stronger of the two because the concept still felt fresh. And any movie with Meryl Streep is always a safe bet.
“The Devil Wears Prada 2” is set 20 years later, and Priestly has somehow mellowed. Her fans would have preferred her to be as feisty as she was in 2006. But times have changed, with mainstream media struggling amid Facebook, TikTok, social media influencers, content creators, etc.
So Priestly bows to the demands of the day and goes wherever the flow leads her. She hangs her own coat at the office, learns the office building has a canteen, and deals with flying economy. Passing by business class before reaching the economy section must have been her purgatory before hell.
We in local media are used to flying economy. We tend to empathize with our bosses, especially in current times.
Writing has always been a hobby for me. When it leveled up to newsletters and eventually lifestyle features and columns, I considered myself lucky to find a niche that enables me to reach out to a wider audience.
Writing is already its own reward. And when someone reacts to what I write, I don’t know how to respond. The response used to be handwritten letters when I was writing to family and friends. And those responses arrived weeks later through snail mail. Those were the days.
These days, the response is in Facebook’s comments section. And if the column is about my diet, which has become my constant topic since February 2022 when I started this healing journey, the discourse can go on forever. How do we meet halfway if I’m a carnivore and the commenter is on a high-carb diet? That’s the question.
Still, I continue to write about my diet because it’s one way to remind myself how essential food is as medicine.
