Pay No Attention.

Most if not all of us have read a book, magazine, email, posted a note on Face book or My Space; some of us have even sent e-greeting cards, text messaged on a cell phone or instant messenger. We are now eight years into the new millennium. What new and amazing advances in communication technology are we going to experience and possibly use during this next hundred years?

I don’t need to spend any money on long distant phone calls to update my friends on my life. I can inform all my friends at once without spending any money and spend even less time in doing so than making a phone call or doing a pop-in.

Currently I am typing this note while I watch a commercial for Tampons on my TV. Thank goodness that this note did not distract me from that. Now I am sipping my coffee, and multitasking between this note and MSN. I have now been informed that I received an email for Viagra. My wife will be happy. Now I am bouncing between three MSN friends, TV, my coffee, a game of online poker and my friends on that website, oh and this note. Now that I told you about the division of my attention does this note seem less sincere? What about instead of typing this note, you sat next to me and I was talking to you, but wait I would be talking to you, my three MSN friends, watching TV, drinking my coffee, was playing poker and also chatting with the people on that website and was checking my email. Let me not forget that while I was talking to you I was not using complete words but was in fact saying things such as LOL, OMG, IMHO, and once in a while held up a picture of :-) or :-( would you feel that our conversation was less sincere?

Which would you find more intimidating and upsetting? An email from a person describing to you that they think you’re an asshole, or a person 6 inches from your face yelling at you that you are and asshole? In either case you are still an asshole.

I can read an email telling me that there are people starving in Africa and people dying in Iraq. Actually I think I have 5 currently in my inbox. That is assuming my spam detector has malfunctioned. I am not going to read them, just click the delete button. I see on my friends Face book that my friends status says” … is L, my exBF DMPD me. HUH. I have little vested interest in any of that crap. If she cannot spend the time to write down her feeling and thoughts in more than one “sentence” without using pictures and random letters than I don’t have the time to care. Perhaps if I was in Iraq and witnessed the killing fist hand, then I might put more than a micro second of time into deleting the email. If my friend asked me if she could meet me for coffee and cry on my shoulder I might not find her “sentence” amusing and have some semblance of pity for her.

We live in a society with a lessening degree of human compassion and interaction. Our society only reinforces our self-centered attitudes and our ever inflating egos. I have many friends with whom I have been friends with for many years. For every fifty emails or text messages I received from them I get or make one phone call to them. For every twenty phone calls that I make to them, I might meet them for a coffee, once. I don’t even need to talk to my wife when she gets home. All information is passed to me on her drive home from her cell phone. I don’t even need to ask how she is doing, or for that matter how any of my friends are doing because, I only need to look to Face book or My Space to discover their emotions. I don’t ever learn why a certain song, movie, or book is important to you. You simple post it on you Face book with the assumption someone actually cares. If you told me that Titanic was your favorite movie because you had a family member die on that ship, and spent some, one on one time with me over a coffee discussing it, I might not laugh at your movie choices. Most of this time all emotion is lost due to the ever eroding English language. Words are replaced with emoticons or abbreviations, thus lessening its impact and becoming more easily dismissible. These people become more of a story book character and less of a person. I have more care and put more thought into how the characters on LOST are making out in their lives because I can at least see their faces and expressions, not to mention they use entire and most of the time correct sentences to explain themselves.

For every layer of distance that we put between us, the more easily dismissible the message becomes. I am less likely to ignore you if you are 4 feet away from me in the chair next to me. A phone call with Caller-ID can be easily ignored. An answering machine message can just as easily be ignored and erased as an email. How is ignoring my instant messenger any less ignorant and asshole-ish than me sitting next to you with my back facing you? I know you are there, you know I am there but I have no interest in removing my attention from something I care about to pay attention to you.

This attitude of “who gives a shit about you” I am more important is cultivated by our technology and seems to have rolled over into real life. The bitch that broke my pen, many years ago, without telling me, down to the ignorant prick that leaves their shopping cart blocking the aisle at the grocery store and the self righteous and ever more ridiculous looking young adults who bump into me so they don’t have to break up their line of 5 friends abreast at the shopping mall are very common and everyday occurrences. It might not be so bad if an apology or an acknowledgement of their selfishness or ignorance was tossed out from time to time. That would be a pipe dream.

If I were a ranting loon I might think that this was all a government ploy to create callous, detached, disinterested, dispassionate, heartless, apathetic, indecisive, arrogant, agenda driving, mindless lemmings.

If you think I am wrong then you are an idiot. I ask you this. How many of you called me or invited me out for a coffee on my Birthday? Other than my mother who does not have Face book and hates email I count zero. Although I received numerous one sentenced illiterate “H-Bday’s” messages and emails. Do not think I am mad. I expect it. Just don’t expect more from me. I fully believe and have come to terms with the above paragraph, although it probably isn’t a government ploy, but the rest is true.

If you want my attention and my empathy don’t sent me an email or a text message or and instant message. My dog knows how to get my attention, and she is the dumbest dog with Down syndrome that ever lived. Take notes from her. She stands in front of me, looks me square in the face and in her own dumb dog Down syndrome language tells me what she wants. To you and me it sounds like a bark, but that bark is filled with more emotion, compassion, and conviction than any email or text message or instant message that you have or ever will type or send in your life.

Don’t Let The Terrorists Win. Don’t send emails describing how terrorism is bad. Thus feeling vindicated that you have done something good and have let justice prevail. Form a fist with your two hands and have a little one on one personal contact with them. It will be more effective.