I was walking home from school, stopped at an intersection waiting for the cars to notice the red light, and the woman next to me began to speak. I turned round thinking behind me stood someone sharing my street-crossing woes but instead I met a rather unfriendly glare which I’m sure had she not already been in a conversation (which I so rudely peeked in on) would have been accompanied by a deep, smoker woman’s “QUOI.”
How dare I look at a private conversation on a public street? How could I be so stupid. Because. Because her phone didn’t even ring. French people keep their phone in their ears! I mean not really, but essentially. They have those iPod-looking ear buds with a microphone dangling and they just push a button and that answers their phone!
Cell phones are bad enough. You can reach anyone at any time and you don’t even have to talk to do it. But now not only can someone far away reach you, only someone far away can reach you. By having plugs in your ears you close yourself off to any actual interaction with the actual people around you. It’s like they’re waiting for someone to ring them; they’ve already got the person (whoever it turns out to be) in their ears.
But maybe that’s appropriate for our (western) culture today. We are a society that lives for the weekend, whose years revolve around holidays, breaks, vacations. I’d like to think of my family as a generally happy, sincere one but even we probably fall into this category. The Christmas letter my mom writes every year will maybe have a line or two about work, but never more.
If I grow up and find a career that gets me excited every day so that I live for the hours and days and not the weekend, I will consider myself successful. If I can write a Christmas letter entirely about daily life so that those people wanting to hear about summers spent with Club Med cannot even get through it, I will consider my life well lived.
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