Looking cool and feeling crappy

Oscar over at ColumnistManifesto analogizes cell phone patter to cigarette puffing. Both fill a void, both create an impression of connectedness. One is disgusting. The other is, a replacement for what medicine has forced us to reject.

But wait. Does anyone ever actually enjoy talking on a cell phone? I never really took to cigarettes and I don’t really take to cell phones either, but still, I did so want to love cigarettes (this is before studies labeled them as Certain Death, even in instances where the smoker is 100 feet removed from you). They were such great pauses in life – they transitioned you from one event to another, they let you take stock, to inhale not so much the smoke, but the moment…

Too bad they always made me feel so crappy. I was glad (some 30 years ago) when they went into disfavor. I was no longer torn between the love for the sport of it and the hatred for the physical effect.

But cell phones – who will take these instruments away from me and tell me they should be banished? Sure, I love them, indeed. There are people whom I would rarely talk to if it weren’t for the cell. But at the same time, I feel ill when it cackles and dies, when it rings at inopportune times, when I pass through areas where it seems just not to work.

Clearly I need a replacement. Should we reconsider chewing gun?