CSotD: The perils of distracted dating
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I've learned not to predict too much about what I'll never do, but I did like today's Rudy Park.
Rudy Park is a partnership between Darrin Bell of Candorville and Theron Heir, who is actually Matt Richtel of the NY Times, using a pseudonym for reasons that probably made sense once but now mostly bring up the important issue of, once everybody knows who you are, do you keep using an utterly transparent pen name?
Apparently, yes.
Still, Richtel won a Pulitzer for a series of articles on distracted driving, so it seems only right to credit him under that name for this riff on distracted dating.
As it happens, I had a letter to the editor about cell phones published in his employer's pages several years back, in which I called them "electronic leashes" and referred to the little dog that Alexander Pope gave to the Prince of Wales, which wore a silver tag reading, "I am His Majesty's dog at Kew. Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?"
At the time, I couldn't imagine walking around with a leash. People on cell phones always sounded like the self-important workaholic Tony Roberts character in "Play It Again, Sam," obsessively checking in with his office and, in those landline days, leaving a string of phone numbers where he could be reached for the next several 15-minute increments.
Funny in the movie, pathetic in real life. And let's not forget that, in the movie, his marriage was foundering because he was so continually distracted. He was everybody's little dog except Diane Keaton's.
Eventually, however, I realized that a cell phone that never rings isn't that much of a burden and that I had reached a point where about 98% of my communications came in by email. Today, I have a cell phone and no landline, since it rarely rings and, if I'm not at home, nobody would answer it when it did.
The fact is, when my phone does ring, it's usually someone who needs to get hold of me right away, since they'd email a question that could wait until I got back from the grocery store or the dog park. If it's a client, well, the old phrase "Money talks and nobody walks" no longer applies, because, when money talks, I walk to the far corner of the dog park and we deal with whatever it is and I have no problem with that.
And, if it's a family member or a friend who just wants to chat, I'll usually take the call because it's such a rarity. Mostly, like I said, they email, so that, by the time they call, we've pretty much covered the major stuff and it really is just a friendly outreach, which is nice.
On the other hand, I don't have a problem with saying, "Can I get back to you?" if I'm in the middle of something, like the Interstate.
But the very reason I'm willing to carry a cell phone is the reason I'm not too keen on carrying a SmartPhone: All the chitchat and chaff that made a cell phone seem like a dog's leash a few years back has now migrated to the Internets, and that is what I want to leave behind when I'm out of the building.
The attractive fallacy being that you can leave your electronic communications on a non-intrusive setting. I don't text very often, I don't tweet at all, I don't need to have every email announce itself. Which brings us back to Alexander Pope and the Prince of Wales: If you are somebody's little dog, you've put the collar on yourself.
I have a few friends who carry their SmartPhones in order to look things up, which is okay if the topic is "Where's the nearest pizza place?" or "What is the proper field treatment for a rattlesnake bite?"
But I know more than a few who, if you say, "What a nice day!" feel compelled to look up the weather for the past month and see where this day actually ranks. I'm obsessive enough that I'd just as soon not have Google in my pocket. It's like Chekhov's gun: If it's there, it's going to get used.
(Historical note: I've just become the first person to use the names "Chekhov" and "Darrin Bell" in the same Internet posting and mean Anton Pavlovich rather than Pavel Andreievich.)
Meanwhile, I would agree with the implication by Bell and Heir/Richtel that the expression, "Hey! I'm up here!" applies to this type of dating distraction, but will leave it to my female readers to determine which is more annoying — a guy who stares at your breasts while distractedly trying to have a conversation with you, or a guy who stares at his hands while distractedly trying to have a conversation with you.
As a guy, I can't help but connect the two and suspect that, if you spend too much time staring at your hands for whatever reason, you'll end up being alone a lot and will eventually go blind.
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