Mensch tracht, und Gott lacht

Friday, July 14, 2006

Decorum

I was in a hospital waiting room yesterday listening (unavoidably so because of volume) to a few women discussing the difficulty of having borne children prior to marriage to men who promised they'd marry them and then disappeared. All in all, highly confirmatory of my own views on the subject, particularly since these ladies talked about how they wished they could take it all back and do it differently, withholding sex until a family had been legally formed.

Despite my ideological agreement with what they were saying, I was a little disturbed by the exceedingly frank tone of their conversation. The talk got fairly graphic at a few points, which doesn't bother me too much, but I kept wondering how some of the older folks felt about it. There was a time when you simply wouldn't have talked that way around strangers and I think it might be better to regress to that point.

3 comments:

James F. Elliott said...

The problem with cell phones is that the new earpieces make it impossible to distinguish the schizophrenics from the regular passerby.

So I just operate on the assumption that all people are schizophrenics.

Hunter Baker said...

I occasionally respond to people on cell phones mistakenly thinking they have addressed me. Then, I feel like an idiot even though I'm not the one apparently speaking into thin air.

Kathy Hutchins said...

It is becoming more and more common to look into the car next to you at a stop light and see every occupant -- the driver, the front passenger, and the tweens in the back seat -- yakking on a cell phone. I assume they're not using up their family plan minutes on each other, but I could be wrong.

I will also point out that, when the writers of "24" wanted to immediately signal to the audience that the shadowy Graham, the eminence grise behind President Jellyfish's perfidy, was a man to not only be distrusted but utterly despised, how did they do it? They gave him a Bluetooth earpiece. 'Nuff said.