Love in the Time of Cell Phones

Not so long ago, I mentioned that I didn’t own a cell phone. “But don’t you have, like, a real job?” That’s what people always say. Yes is the answer; full-time employment as an editor and a writer seems real to me, at least.

David Clark

“Don’t you have kids?” is the next question. Yes again, and the kids are real, too. But for the hour or so a day when I am not within arm’s reach of an old-fashioned landline, they somehow get by without me. With only a mom and teachers and a nanny and a small neighborhood of people who know them on sight, how do they do it? I don’t know.

My message, in case you missed it, is this: The world turns without me, and I don’t mind saying so. 

Now, it’s possible to be proud of one’s insignificance, and I was definitely laying it on a bit thick that day.

Still, it’s true that I don’t like cell phones. I don’t like their showiness. I don’t like the guy at my regular coffee shop who’s always there talking real estate as if he’s Donald Trump. I don’t like the girl on the Metro who’s puffed up with rage as she treats everyone in earshot to a lipsmacking, hand-on-the-hip account of exactly what he did and he said and that whore and mm-hmm and nuh-unh.

I don’t like the social signaling of cell phones. They say, “I am needed elsewhere, unlike you.” Now, maybe that last part isn’t intended, but it’s an accurate reflection of the way the first part of the signal is received, at least by me.

At red lights, I watch the passing traffic and tally the drivers who are talking on cell phones. Sometimes I count seven or eight in a row talking away just as if they weren’t traveling 40, 50 miles an hour in rolling two-ton metal missiles. 

I know. I’m a little round the bend on this subject. And now my position has become rather awkward. See, I just got a BlackBerry, which of course has a cell phone.