I recently used an honest-to-goodness print dictionary

The other day I was reading an online article that described someone as "magisterial," one of many words for which I think I know the definition but am never quite sure.

I instinctively opened a new tab on my browser and was getting ready to Google "magisterial" when I happened to glance to my right. There, sitting on the bottom shelf of the small bookcase in my office, was the 2006 edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

I'm talking about a bound, printed dictionary. Not some sort of electronic tool, but a hefty tome of more than 2,000 pages, the likes of which you could find in virtually every classroom when I was growing up.

Rather than consulting Mr. Google for the 20th time that day, I instead picked up the dictionary. And man, it was heavy. There were several pounds of words in there, everything from "a" (the logical first entry) to "zyzzyva" (which as you know is "any of the various tropical American weevils of the genus Zyzzyva, often destructive to plants").

I found "magisterial" on page 1051, just under "Maginot" and right above "magisterium."

The American Heritage people offered up three somewhat differing definitions, but only one made sense in context: "Sedately dignified in appearance or manner: 'She would appear on the porch and reign over the street in magisterial beauty.'"

Which is pretty much what I thought it meant, but it was good to get confirmation.

The last time I remember diving heavily into a print dictionary was in 6th grade (1981-82), when a vocabulary assignment from Mrs. Schwarzenberg forced us to crack open the musty old Webster's that sat on a small table in the Mapledale Elementary School library.

(Honestly, I think we used that dictionary as much to look up words like "penis" and "flatulence" than to decipher legitimate vocabulary words.)

Now, believe me when I say I am a champion of technology and progress. I embrace the new and innovative without so much as a backward glance when it comes to home entertainment devices, artificial intelligence, and all manner of electronic gizmos and gadgets.

But there was a nostalgic part of me that really enjoyed flipping through a print dictionary and finding the meaning of a word that had stumped me.

It was slower than Google, but in the end it had the same result and somehow felt...purer? Is that the word I want? More authentic?

It's a silly thought, I know. Who cares how I got the definition as long as I got there? What makes one method better than another?

Nothing, I suppose. I just didn't realize how much I missed 10-pound, 2,000-page dictionaries.

It made me happy that I've lugged this particular one with me from job to job and office to office for so many years.

There's no way I should be looking at my phone half as much as I do

Whenever I leave the house, I check my pockets to ensure I have three things on me:

• My car keys
• My wallet
• My iPhone

If you were to tell me I had to leave one of these things behind, I would put my wallet back in the dresser and make sure I wasn't in a position where I would need it. If you were to tell me I had to leave two of these things at home, I would immediately drop my wallet and car keys and unhesitatingly walk wherever I was headed.

This is both true and sad.

I look at my phone all the time. ALL. THE. TIME. I look it at while I'm standing at a urinal. Really, I do.

Because apparently I need to know 24/7 whether someone has commented on my Facebook status, whether my tweet has been favorited, or whether an extremely non-urgent work email has popped into my inbox in the past four minutes. And sometimes I just suddenly need to play an emergency game of electronic cribbage.

I cannot simply exist. I cannot just sit there and think. If there's a lull in a conversation or a break in whatever action I'm engaged in, I must fill in that time with phone browsing.

And most of the time, that's all I'm really doing: browsing. Just looking. Just checking to see if any life-changing information has come across my phone that I absolutely must know right this minute.

More than 99% of the time, I find nothing that couldn't have waited five more minutes. Or 10 more minutes. Or an hour. Or until tomorrow.

I am truly addicted, though it's not the phone itself to which I'm addicted. And it's not even the phone's output that has me hooked. It's the promise of finding something funny/interesting/uplifting/useful that drives me. Just that little bit of potential, rarely fulfilled, is enough to make me look at my phone every few minutes throughout my waking hours.

And I need to stop it. I know this. I need to stop it.

But that's so much easier said than done. I want to go back to a time when I could simply sit still for awhile and think. Or not even think. Just BE.

Yet I've lost the capacity to act that way. How? How did this happen? When did I and others like me lose the ability to be disconnected? I'd like to figure that out.

You don't know how close I just came to hopping on my phone to Google "phone addiction."