cellular argo i turned off my phone for a week. and when i turned it back on to crawl out of my cell no one had called. 040821 ... raze i watched a woman sit down at a table in a restaurant. a little while later she was joined by her son, who looked maybe eighteen, and her husband. the woman and the teenager both pulled out their cell phones and spent the whole time they were there swiping or texting or whatever they were doing. the husband sat with no one to talk to and nothing to do, looking lost. he might as well have been there alone. it wasn't a family outing. it was a wake. i have friends who use their phones to communicate with others. but more and more, people seem to use them as an excuse to ignore whoever's right in front of their face. the last time i went to someone's house for christmas, after we exchanged the briefest of smalltalk almost everyone pulled out their phones and turned into zombies with their eyes glued to the LCD screens. there was no conversation. no interaction. if anyone typed "LOL" to whoever they were chatting with, it was a lie. if someone tried that back when i was a kid, they would have got a smack on the back of the head and their phone would have been confiscated until the end of the day. maybe someone who didn't have much to say would read a book. that was about it. a gathering was a glorious, messy, noisy thing. now more often than not it's limited to whatever dispassionate words you can squeeze out of someone before they start checking facebook. 170630 ... raze another teenager was so wrapped up in whatever he was doing on his phone, his mother had to physically move him out of the way to create a path for other people to get into the refrigerated beverage section his body was blocking at the grocery store. verbal commands did no good. five minutes later, he still had his face in his phone, oblivious to anything going on around him. i don't think his eyes left that screen for even a second the whole time he was there. 170719 what's it to you? who go blather from