Sunday, December 26, 2004

Quiz on social correctness:

Is this right, is this wrong?

1. Cellphone rings in restaurant. You answer it.
2. You’re talking to your pal and the cellphone rings. You pause in your talk and check to see who is calling.
3. You’re at home, the phone rings, you wait to see who it is and if you feel like talking to him/her.

If you read the NYTMagazine article on the evolution of connectedness, maybe you’ll have given a fleeting thought to your own standards of what is passable behavior. The author considers the following trends in the ways we attempt to connect to others:

In fact, it’s now considered rude not to have some sort of machine to take messages for you. And not only have we become used to machines that take messages, we also sometimes prefer them to live communications…

Between cellphones, email and instant messaging, it’s now considered exotic to be truly unreachable at all.
The article suggests that in making decisions about answering, checking the caller’s ID, etc, you are making a series of instant status judgments. You flip open your cellphone for some, not for others.

It says something about me that I am constantly being preempted by a cell call. It could be that I am boring. It could be that people even get coconspirators to dial their number, just so they could have a respite from our exchange. At less paranoid times, I have concluded that I appear so completely benign and informal that the world out there has determined that I cannot easily be offended by such behaviors. Or at least that I wont kill the perpetrator.

Okay, I’ll confess: I wont kill, but I do hate the whole imposition of pseudo-connectedness on human interaction. You’re hanging at home – pick up the darn phone. You’re out and about, hanging with someone, trash or silence your cell, or at the very least, ignore the precious Ode to Joy when it sounds in your pocket. Bach would have wanted it that way.

Classic post-holiday behavior

And how did you commemorate the day after? My day thus far had the following scintillating components:

A visit to a store to exchange a game. We’re into games around here but, predictably, everyone has strong preferences as to what talent is to be tapped. I, for instance, hate trivia games, but love “make up creative lies” type games. Others feel differently about this. I have been accused of being extremely competitive, to the point that I will use every devious strategy to sink a competitor and come out victorious. Of course, this is the opposite of how I really am. Honestly!! Anyway, I exchanged my first choice for someone else’s first choice. It’s Christmas, I can be magnanimous.

A visit to the gym. This goes without saying. Anyone who stands and cooks all day long and then devours all that comes off the stove, sometimes even before it is fully off the stove, needs to go to the gym after the holidays. I was not the only one there.

Reading the newspaper. I have not done this for a while. I’d been gone, I’d been busy, I’ve had every excuse to avoid picking up hard, dirty print. Today I am back at it. Things that caught my fancy: Maureeen Dowd’s tribute to Mary McGrory. Part of me would very much like to be like Mary McGrory: brilliant with words, always on the job, inquisitive, plucky, biting sharp, pushy. I think I can appropriate two from that list: plucky and inquisitive. The rest – merely aspirational. At the end of the article, Dowd cites McGrory’s advice to her nephew, given to him at a stuffy D.C. party: “Always approach the shrimp bowl like you own it.” Absolutely right. There’s no need to pander to stuffiness in this world.