THE ANCIENT ART OF PHONE CALLING part 2

     Basically, text messaging was created to make sure kids kept spending money during school days. Think about it. It's a simple fact that phone companies made less money when teenage girls weren't talking on the phone. This included all the hours they spent trapped in classrooms.  With texting, they could contact each other in different rows or in different classrooms without the teacher even knowing. What teenage girl or boy with at least a few friends and some social standing wouldn't want to text and be texted. It's the modern, high-tech version of note-passing. And it was the perfect way for the phone companies to finally infiltrate the classroom and anywhere else that children and adults couldn't, or didn't want to, talk freely on their phones.
     But not even the creators of text messaging imagined the impact it was going to have on how the world communicates. It's gone more global than global warming. Texting was only supposed to to be an adjunct to phone calls. It was not supposed to drive people away from phone calling.
    We are witnessing, no less creating, a paradigm shift in communication that is undoing what the telephone, in all its glory for 130 years has so amazingly given us--the gift of having conversations and hearing each others' voices.  It rewards us  in all the ways that 'LOL' and :) , and the more dramatic, heart-felt  :(  never do. The spontaneous roar of laughter, the perfectly timed retort, the drawl of sarcasm, the all-telling pregnant pause, the silent stand-off,  the sniffle of a hidden cry, the romanticism of not hanging up first, the quirky nuances of our voices along with the inflections and tones we use that in an instant convey exactly how we want something to be understood, are all being thrown overboard.
   We are willingly abandoning a level of communication we have come to expect from each other and are now prepared to accept much less. Phone calling does not seem to be part of the modern plan, even though the telephone was one of the most modern inventions of all-time.  It was the greatest thrill of the twentieth century.  Thousands of people lined the streets just to use one of the few on display for the first time in the 1870's. And the ritual continued when the phone arrived in every new country, then in every new city, then in every new village for decade after decade. People lined up because they wanted to talk.  There are Indigenous people in remote regions who are still only now being introduced to the phone for the first time. Some don't even have a written language. The question is how long  after they develop  one will they be texting instead of talking? Is it some kind of evolutionary process that we first crave talking on the phone then we come to hate it?  Now we do whatever it takes not to speak on the phone. We've gone from a society that talked to each other for almost a century and a half to a society that wants to only text each other, all  in a matter of a few years.  Why have we latched onto this so quickly and so easily? Have we always been this desperate not to talk to each other?
   I've been trying to go back and think when and how it all started happening. Early texting was as  innocent as an address, a phone number, confirming plans, an  arrival time.  It was also a great, quick way to let people know that plans had changed. But then we realized we could cancel plans with a text too, and how much easier and less guilty it felt not having to fully explain ourselves or hear the disappointment in the friend's voice over the phone. Soon after, people were using texts to avoid anything that an actual conversation would have made more unpleasant or awkward. Consolidating one's thoughts and feelings onto a small screen using a vocabulary of lettered abbreviations has a great appeal for those who think talking on the phone has turned into more of a commitment that they generally want to make. Its the most some people are willing to be available for. Texting allows us to be as disengaged as we want to be while still remaining in contact with each other. It's like contacting your neighbor across the street but doing it with hand-held signs and binoculars to read them. These days, when you do get a phone call from someone it feels like a grand gesture.  We are using text messages in so many ways now that I can't help but wonder how the rules are regarding what still must be said over the phone and not by text. Is there anything? People I know have been broken-up via text, have received death notifications of a grandmother and of a cat, have been turned down for a job, have been notified of cancer, have been told by a birth mother that she is changing her mind and keeping her baby,  and have been informed to get checked for Syphilis ( that unfortunately was a text I got ).
   It's gotten to the point that we're even allowed to argue using texting. My good friend and his boyfriend just had a week long argument texting each other back and forth from their individual apartments. First of all,unless two people text at the same speed, one person is going to be answering the first point while the other person is already on to the second point. Rebuttals that made sense when they were being typed arrive at the wrong time and confuse things even more. These guys kept getting more and more frustrated as they flung texts but neither of them would pick up the phone and call. Since the beginning of their relationship, all their contact when they weren't in the same place was through texts, so they had no practice in how to speak with each other over the phone.
    This is becoming the case more and more. And the younger the person, the bigger the role texting plays. Now, young kids growing up with texting don't even consider making a phone call an option. They usually have to be forced to speak on it, and its almost always to older relatives. The ones I feel most sorry for are the grandparents out there who got totally blindsided by their grandchildren switching from the phone to the text. It's created a huge generation gap, even bigger than the computer did. With arthritic fingers, worsening hearing and a life-long attachment to phone calling, many grandparents don't want to learn a whole new way of communicating at their age. Unfortunately, this might mean that they'll have less contact with their grandchildren. But, on the positive side, if most of the older grandparents out there now refuse to text, no one has to worry about them hitting the wrong key and by accident sending their entire family 'sexting' messages with pics attached.
    I know there's no way for me to stop this texting phenomenon from happening. People all around are trying to suck me into the texting abyss. So far, I've given in only to one close friend, and that's only because his hatred of  phone conversations predates texting ( you know who you are).  I've been able to hold off almost everyone else but I can feel the levee isn't going to hold up much longer. I'm going to just have to adapt a little. It's not that I am totally opposed to it. I text sometimes, and even enjoy it when they're playful. But there are the other times that I am as guilty as anyone else in using texting to suit my purposes. Yes, I admit it! I know exactly when I've done it and why I've done it. It's not easy for me to do but sometimes it must be done. There are people in this world who I always want to talk to, and there are people in this world who I want to talk to sometimes, and there are a few  people in this world who I don't want to talk to at all. Oh that reminds me, I have to go and text my mother.

THE ANCIENT ART OF PHONE CALLING part 1

  

     Most stutterers wish Alexander Graham Bell was never born. What a sadistic man he must have been to invent such a  torturous contraption that demands you talk into it. No crueler punishment has ever befallen the stuttering community. And if the trauma of the phone wasn't bad enough, some fiendish person came along and invented the answering machine too. It meant that from now on a stutter could be captured on tape and replayed over and over.Your stuttered words become someone else's property and they can do whatever they want with it. They could even play it out loud on speaker phone at a party for entertainment. Imagine, the horror!
   The fear of the phone experienced by most stutterers goes beyond any phobia. It is not a fear born in the mind, and it does not go away if you stop thinking about it. It is real, it is ringing, and it is waiting for you to stutter when you answer it. If you ask a stutterer which of three rooms is the scariest to enter -- the one with the tiger, the one with the dangling live electric wires, or the one with the phone that has to be answered, he probably wouldn't be able to tell you because he's already been mauled to death or electrocuted.
    Considering all the humiliation and anxiety the telephone has caused generations of stutterers, it makes perfect sense that people who stutter have a profound dislike and distrust of the phone. What doesn't make sense is my relationship with the phone. I am a stutterer who is addicted to talking on the phone. I can't say for sure I'm the only stutterer like this but I personally have never met another stutterer who had as big a mouth as me and is on the phone as much. What's especially odd is how I'm drawn to the very thing that should be specifically difficult enjoying for a person with a speech problem. A stutterer who is constantly on the phone is equivalent to a paraplegic rock climber or a legally blind archer.
     I have what is almost a romantic relationship with my cellphone. It is what I keep closest to my heart, literally, in the breast pocket of my scrubs. Sometimes I hear people say they left their phone home on the kitchen table or at the office or just decided not to carry it.  To me, it's like deciding not to carry one of my bodily organs.  "I think I'll leave my liver home today."
   My phone, like a pacemaker,  is never turned off.  When I'm at work at the hospital though, I do make the concessions of switching  it to vibrate and never answering it when I'm with a patient. Answering it while I'm helping someone who had a stroke walk for the first time or climb stairs would be detrimental to the patient and even more detrimental to my employment. I only check my voicemail in the hallways away from patients, and make quick calls in the bathroom.  ( I am confessing this  because these quick calls happen only  when I am sitting on the toilet anyway.  I take care of two things at once that  end at the same time causing the hospital no loss of productivity. This is actually an excellent example of an employee multi-tasking, and should be used as a teaching tool throughout my hospital )  I save my longer calls for lunchtime. I have to start my phone calling while I'm still at work  because if I waited until I got home, there would never be enough time to make all the calls I want to make.
   Why I'm like this I can't exactly figure out, but it does give me another perfect opportunity to blame my mother Priscilla for something. The telephone was her tool of choice to use to either show her love or unleash her rage. On a typical weekday she would call up my father at his store 20 times day, 40 when she was mad at him. Scream, hang-up, call back, scream, hang-up, call back. In her mind, calling even if she was planning on  screaming still showed she cared. She was on the phone early morning to late at night, and the receiver usually smelled either like coffee, Norell#10 perfume, cinnamon gum, alcohol, or the unique salty smell of her tears. How she sounded when she was speaking to someone was a preview of how she was going to act when she hung up. I was so accustomed to hearing her on one of  the five telephones in our house that when there was silence, my first thought was always that she had a heart attack or strangled herself by accident with the extra-long coiled phone cords she always ordered. The telephone was such an intricate and important part of her life and her relationships that I grew up thinking that being phoned meant being loved. She would hand me the receiver and make me talk to her friends and our relatives so often that it became a natural thing for me to do even with my stutter. When I started making friends and getting calls myself, I was never more proud, especially in front of her. Thirty-five years later the ring of my phone still excites me.( Well, except if I see on caller I.D. that it's my mother. Ironically, she's the only person who I don't want a call from.)
  My dedication to the art of phone calling has turned into a battle I seem to be having with everyone. The enemy is text messaging, and it is overtaking the world.  I realize I am in this battle alone. No other stutterer feels this way.  Teenage girls are the only other demographic group who embraced textingTexting is what stutterers have been waiting for their whole lives. Finally a way to call someone without having to talk. What could be better?
   In all honesty I completely understand their excitement and relief, and don't blame anyone for texting who has suffered over the telephone like my fellow stutterers have. As a matter of fact, right here and now I give every stutterer out there a free pass to text whenever they want. If anyone deserves it, they do.
   As for the rest of you out there texting instead of calling, don't think you'll keep on getting away with it. You are not escaping talking to me over phone.You are going to have to suffer through my stutter every time I call, like you did before anyone even knew what texting was.

                                       END OF PART 1

THE DAYS OF DARKNESS HAVE ENDED

     This is an official announcement that my days of  beard dying are done.  My brown beard is no more. Period. Sorry for having to put you through my trials and tribulations over it but I had to come to some realizations that only doing it would have brought me to. Thanks to all my friends and ex's and co-workers who tried to convince me to stop, especially the really brutal ones( you know who you are).  And special thanks to my boyfriend Alex who "by accident" forgot to pack the bag I gave him with the dye in it inside his suitcase before we left for Europe. After trying to find the French version of Just For Men in Paris which seemed to be impossible( French men lie about not dying their beards) I turned to him and admitted that the search was absurd, the beard is absurd, and I'm absurd for doing it.
     "I've been waiting for you to realize this. I love you with a gray beard."
    At that moment I decided to take the leap. I grew up a little. It felt great and still does. But don't expect me to act so sensibly about other things. These moments of maturity come rarely, like eclipses.

A CRY FOR CUCUMBERS

     Europe, don't destroy cucumbers just because of E.coli. Send them our way. San Francisco is always in need of cucumbers. People here have ways of using them and other similarly-shaped vegetables that Europeans haven't, or don't want to, think about. (Well, maybe the Germans have.)
   God did not intend raw vegetables to be put only in salad bowls.They are meant to be put other places as well, especially in times of a health crisis like this.  A cucumber is more than food, it can be turned into a date, and bring you hours of entertainment.  The preparation is nothing fancy. It's as easy as asking your grocer what isle the Crisco is kept, after you choose the properly-sized cucumber depending on your needs and talents.
    Don't forsake the cucumber now. It has been one of the friendliest and most engaging vegetables. And it has pleased some of us in ways that spinach, cauliflower, and broccoli never have.