Waiting By The Phone

It has recently occurred to me that none of my problems were really that bad until I got a cell phone.

This might sound unfair. However, after teaching a full year for an alternative school filled with boys trying to hook up wit they gurls or score sum green and girls trying to holla at they boy or talk trash, I realized that this was exactly the problem with our generation. 

When I was in high school I had to make plans so I could go out with a guy. For a full year in college, I had to make plans. I had to buy a phone with an answering machine for my dorm room because I did not have a cell phone. 

When we took sixteen year old Bridget's phone away last year, she was so mad that she broke the plate glass door at the back of the classroom. She didn't surrender the phone until her social worker had arrived, and when she did, Bridget was pitching a fit because without the phone she would not be able to talk to her eighteen year old boyfriend who had only recently been let out of jail. 

What the heck!?

It's like Complication 101. 

Instead of building a relationship on trust and awkward admissions cell phones allow you to end up texting whoever it is in over-confident flirtation until you agree to meet out somewhere. A bar no less. Leave it to Instant Messaging and Texts. Research shows that people are always more comfortable writing their thoughts to one another and crafting their conversations so that they reveal less of themselves and appear more confident. 

This is why I think now that everyone in the free world, everyone with a cell phone, is unavoidably engaging in that awkward and solitary act of waiting by the  phone. Our whole lives are spent "waiting" by our phones for someone to text, to call. How often do we do anything without bringing our cell phones.

So once we admit that our cell phones run our lives, lets take it a step further. When we connect with someone else we take their numbers. But my question is: What happens when we disconnect? 

I think a lot of people leave these numbers in our phones. Talk about little black books, we walk around with them all the time. Our cell phones are the most memory driven things we own. Certain pictures we've captured with them, certain phone numbers we're amazed or ashamed to have gotten sit idle in these memory banks of information that will never need to be tapped. 

This is why I'm going to start writing something new. 

I will go ahead and be the first. I have over 200 contacts in my cell phone right now. And only maybe 5 people have called me in the last month. In an act of letting go of my yucky baggage that I'm actually fond of and have been known to call "rich history," I'm going to slowly delete ALL the unused contacts. And you will get a front seat on my slow but steady attempt to rid myself of it all. 

Just to let you know.

Oh, and I'm terribly sorry that I haven't written for you in literally 6 months.