When I went to college, I used to carry a lot of stuff with me.  I took the bus…  and I would lug around a large filing box on wheels full of sheet music, a backpack that had all of my books and stuff in it, another box that had floppies and stuff…  I carried around a lot of stuff.

This was thirty years ago.

I realized today that probably the only thing I’d need to carry was a tablet, maybe a laptop if I needed to do something particularly intensive, and any accessories needed for that.  Pretty much nothing else.  That one device can pretty much do everything I needed all that stuff to do back then.

I carried around a portable CD player.  No longer needed.  A portable tape player.  No longer needed.  Textbooks.  No longer needed.  Paper and pens, etc.  No longer needed.  Sheet music.  No longer needed.  Floppies.  No longer needed.  CDs.  No longer needed.  An organizer.  No longer needed.  I’m not even sure I’d even need a locker like I did then.  Maybe I still would but it would need to have very little in it.

What a difference thirty years makes.

The only thing that I’d need that I still need now is the actual instrument.  Piano, or… stage piano.  Like my Roland RD-700NX, which is so much like an actual piano that it is sufficient for practice, etc.  and it only weighs ~50 lbs instead of half a ton or more.  Still a lot to carry but at least it’s something that can be carried.

When I was in Japanese class back in 2018 I still carried some of that stuff around.  Folders, textbooks, paper…  and I wonder actually how much of that would be needed even now.  My textbooks for my new teacher are all on google books.  All the assignments are just printed page by page, or maybe even just filled out on the tablets.  The recordings are all available online, a code isn’t even needed.

Things have changed an awful lot in thirty years, and it’s kind of amazing, actually.