March 21, 2023

Surly.

Having documented nearly half of my life in the blog thing (which is no longer in a trendy thing to do) can be an interesting experience. Every once in a while I’ll talk about something that has happened to us in the past and there will be a disagreement on the specificity of the events. Occasionally I’ll turn to the blog and see if I wrote something about said event. It’s a 50/50 chance as to whether I wrote anything about what we’re talking about, but as I start strolling through blog entries nearing two decades old, I realize that I’m basically the same person I was 20 years ago, albeit with remarks around different stages of technology.

For example, this blog entry from 2005 illustrates how I felt about the increasing use of cell phones in public at the time. Older and wiser(?) me looks back at this entry and notices a level of hysterics that I don’t feel nearly as much these days. Jaded? No, I don’t think so.

I want to know when everyone became so damn important that they had to yak on their cell phone whereever they may be. Are people so full of themselves and so self righteous that they think that they need to be available to their public every single, solitary second of the day? What happened to a little “down time”? The morning commute was your chance to organize yourself for the day, maybe win a contest on the radio and breathe in the sunshine and exhaust fumes. Now everyone is busy making appointments with their metrosexual stylist, yelling at the kids for making toast with the clothes iron and calling ahead for Dunkin Donuts buckets of coffee all via their cell phone.

I think the comparison is similar to what Bea Arthur discussed in one of her last interviews, comparing Maude Findlay from “Maude” to Dorothy Zbornak from “The Golden Girls”.

“They were the same height, but Dorothy would probably tell Maude to calm down a little bit”.