“Nothing to write home about” had been a joke in his father’s
time, when all soldiers wanted was to write home or receive mail from loved
ones. It had mutated since then, into a dismissal of events that the needy
would have cherish. No one wrote home enough these days. No one called their
mothers enough, or had heart-to-hearts with Dad, or took five minutes to simply
make sure everyone was okay and lunch went well. It was a dismissed world.
The cell phone didn’t change things the way he wanted it to.
Somehow the ease of dialing, or having a number auto-dialed, and having a brief
conversation amounted to an effort that left people rationalizing to keep their
minutes. The postal service was on the verge of demise, and e-mail was
outmoded. Nothing was simple enough for the stupid mind to write home and keep
those micro-contacts firing in the shape of a real life.
I heard a statistic, and this was a couple-few years ago, that more data was exchanged every day via texts than exsists in every book in every library on the planet. Made me think about that infinite number of monkeys at that infinite number of typewriters.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to send my mother a postcard today.
Hey, I call my parents once a week! I do! Why are you looking at me like that? :D
ReplyDeleteI do call my mom every day, but texting has actually helped me stay in touch with my siblings more often...hellos, encouragements, jokes, pics of the kids...I love it.
ReplyDeleteAnd I try and stay in touch less, not more. I do not want to be connected all of the time. So I am not. My mobile (cell) phone spends much of its life off - as does the computor. It works for me.
ReplyDeleteI always thought "nothing to write home about" was a shorthand joke for "it's amazing, but it's not that amazing." The criticism is of the event or scene at hand, not whether or not to write.
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