.
I'm driving down the hill above the capitol, wanted to get pictures of the Key Bank from up there before they imploded it. I'm going maybe 30 MPH when this woman in a Volvo SUV decides she wants to go 40. Rides my rear bumper until I almost come to a stop, and then she tries to pass me. On a residential street. Well, her asinine driving aside, the whole time she was behind me she was, of course, yakking away on her cell phone. As much as I hate cell phones and driving, that's not even the point of this post - the point is that what looked like her daughter was sitting in the passenger seat right next to her, that we are getting altogether too comfortable talking to someone across the valley through a little box rather than the warm, living, breathing person right next to us. Ever seen 3 people at a restaurant, all of them on cell phones? 2 people in a car or a group in the park? I have. This woman may very well have had something important to tell someone, something that couldn't have waited. How sad, though, if she let her daughter sit there in silence as she chatted with her friend about last weekend? Or even been talking to her office about something that could have waited 15 minutes?
I firmly believe that no matter how "connected" we claim to be with e-mail, cell phones and even blogs like this, that NOTHING compares to sitting down next to someone and chatting face to face. And we, as a society, are willfully giving that up.
Pathetic.
