The Cellular Link
Nearly every day I am amazed at how often I find myself in the near vicinity of someone who is talking on a cell phone. I'm on the bus after class and I'm listening to a girl tell her mother in exasperated, impatient tones the intricate details about the exact photo she wants on her wedding invitation. At work I'm ringing up a woman for a pair of soccer cleats and socks and I can hear her fighting with her husband over what he said he'd do. I'm watching a movie and my friend is discussing the outcome of basketball game.
I'm not going to analyze or comment on the fact that our society is ultra-dependent on our phones, and I am SO completely a part of that population, but rather I find something cute about listening to people talk. I like to imagine the person on the other end of the line and their surroundings. Someone, somewhere is listening to the other half of the conversation that I am missing. The girl's mother is standing in line at a grocery store discussing the invitations and a forty year old mother of five is listening to her ardent support of another photograph. Perhaps the forty year old wonders, even if for just a moment, why the daughter doesn't agree with the mother about the picture. And I wonder why the daughter is growing increasingly impatient with her mother. Right there, in that second I share a bond with a woman about whom I know nothing, who I may never see in my entire life. But we're connected. Arbitrarily, inexplicably, undeniably. She knows something I will never know and vice versa. And then, the second we stop caring we're no longer connected. I wonder what people I've been connected with in this way. An accomplished, respectable old man? An old friend of mine? My soul mate? Maybe someone neat like Sandra Day O'Connor or Paris Hilton.
I'm not going to analyze or comment on the fact that our society is ultra-dependent on our phones, and I am SO completely a part of that population, but rather I find something cute about listening to people talk. I like to imagine the person on the other end of the line and their surroundings. Someone, somewhere is listening to the other half of the conversation that I am missing. The girl's mother is standing in line at a grocery store discussing the invitations and a forty year old mother of five is listening to her ardent support of another photograph. Perhaps the forty year old wonders, even if for just a moment, why the daughter doesn't agree with the mother about the picture. And I wonder why the daughter is growing increasingly impatient with her mother. Right there, in that second I share a bond with a woman about whom I know nothing, who I may never see in my entire life. But we're connected. Arbitrarily, inexplicably, undeniably. She knows something I will never know and vice versa. And then, the second we stop caring we're no longer connected. I wonder what people I've been connected with in this way. An accomplished, respectable old man? An old friend of mine? My soul mate? Maybe someone neat like Sandra Day O'Connor or Paris Hilton.