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cellphone-based show & tell
Wednesday, March 16 2016
This morning temperatures were in the 60s and I heard the first Phœbes of the nascent springtime. I love that sound, even if it means that the annoying little flies that Phœbes eat can't be far behind.
I was still coughing big chunks of nastiness out of my lungs, so to give myself a higher quality of life, I took a recreational 120 milligram dose of pseudoephedrine. This not only cleared up my symptoms for most of the day, but it also gave me the mental energy to plow through a rather dull web development assignment, a late-hour broadening of the spec for a project I've been working on since early December.
This afternoon I gathered a load of salvaged firewood from the nearby forest along the Stick Trail, though it only came to 88.85 pounds. Since my recent illness, I haven't had the energy to carry home large loads from very deep in the woods.
This evening, we'd be meeting with friends to celebrate Nancy's birthday at Kodomo (that Asian restaurant located in Kingston's dreariest shopping center), but on the way we first went to the Hurley Vet to pick up a prescription of prednisone as a hospice medication for Eleanor's lymphoma and then we went to the Hurley Mountain Inn to meet up with the new renters of our Wall Street house in Kingston. The plan was to have them sign the rental agreement and write us a fat check, but there was an unexpected glitch in the plan. We just happened to pick from within the very brief period near St. Patrick's when the Hurley Mountain Inn cooks up an ungodly amount of corned beef to be served to throngs of diners, none of whom would look the least bit out of place at a rally for Donald J. Trump. When we rolled up, we actually had trouble finding parking and had to drive around to the spots on the south side of the building, a section of the parking lot I had never been in before. Our renters showed up at about the same time, and we went into the restaurant hoping to find a place to do the paperwork. On most normal nights, there would have only been four or five occupied tables, but tonight the place was mobbed. Still, there was an empty table, and we quickly sat down at it and got to work. Our renters dutifully signed in the various places, and when a waitress showed up, I ordered a beer (though the others just wanted water or nothing). Soon thereafter, though, a hostess came over and gave us a look that said, "Guys, I need this table." So we finished up the paperwork standing at the place at the bar where waitresses pick up their drinks. I never did get that beer I'd ordered (which would have been a Goose Island IPA).
We picked up Nancy at her house and then met the others at Kodomo. Others in attendance included Susan and David, Sarah the Vegan, Kate, and Kate's boyfriend Joe, the guy who owns the auto repair place on Albany Avenue where my Subaru can reliably pass a state inspection. Nancy was showered with gifts fairly early in our meal, and, once unwrapped from his tinfoil prison, my little painting of Dr. Steve Brule sat out on the table for the rest of the meal. Most of us ate vegan sushi, though David and I didn't find two rolls to be quite enough, and ordered thirds late in the meal. Conversation went through a number of surprisingly dull phases, particularly when Joe talked at length about skiing and snowboarding, but also when someone brought up Zumba as a topic. (At that point, I turned to David and said that Zumba is among my least favorite dinner topics.) Later, though, the topic of CB radios came up, and Gretchen talked about the period in the mid 2000s when, after being inspired by Smokey and the Bandit, we installed CB radios in our cars. That's a good topic of discussion, but the gut-bursting laughter didn't start until Gretchen because acting like a small child with adnoid problems talking over a CB radio. "Uhmm, bweakah one nine! I tink I gotta go poo poo weal weal bad! Is deahwl a bafroom up ahead? And awe deahwl any bad men deahwl?" Gretchen's is one of the most perfect little kid voices I have ever heard an adult produce, and anything said in it infects all who overhear it with incapacitating laughter.
Susan and David have a fondness for cultural learning opportunities. This has led them to take pottery classes and attend that live model drawing class at BSP. Before all that, though, they'd enrolled in a swing dancing class. Sadly, though, they eventually had to abandoned it, mostly due to halitosis. Participants in the classes are asked to change partners, and since all the others in the class are significantly older than Susan and David, they tend to have the terrible breath that comes from a lifetime of poor dental hygiene.
Towards the end of the meal, though everybody started one-upping each other with cute animals they'd found on their smartphones. The fact that everyone these days has a personal television set in his or her pocket is not an entirely good thing. It forces people to socialize in an entirely reactive way to stuff coming off a screen displaying content the phone's owner hopes will produce a certain reaction. Because our reactions must key to the flow and beats of this miniaturized media, it utterly dominates the conversation and leaves little room for reactions other than wordless moans of adulation (some of which are probably insincere). And once a cellphone-based show & tell starts, it tends to feed on itself until all normal socializing is obliterated. Having a personal cellphone signal jammer would allow me to break this vortex long enough for people to abandon their phones and resume socializing with their time-tested talents of human conversation.
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