Should I feel ashamed to have had the ability, if not the laziness, to write that first line? I kind of think I should. Being a lover of the language, an English major, one who appreciates the descriptive, eloquent, and not necessarily economical prose of the classic authors I should consider this kind of communication the antithesis of creativity. It's reductivism at its worst in that nothing has been gained from what was lost except time and keystrokes. Time and effort. The world is in a hurry to reduce time and effort. They're rushing around desperately seeking methods and ideas to reduce the rushing and desperation of our daily lives. Drinking Red Bull, attention spans reverting to childhood levels, heartrates soaring, stress peaking, excitement maxxing out all so they can save a little extra time every day to complain instantaneously to all their friends on all their various electronic devices about how bored they are.
What ever happened to "stop and smell the roses?" "All good things come to those who wait." "The journey is half the fun." What happened to "patience is a virtue?" I have been in Korea over a month now without a phone. Yes, I have risen to legendary status in the country already. There are those who don't believe I exist. Some tell tales of sightings that are scoffed at by others. A few have even had encounters with me and taken out-of-focus smart phone shots of me. Like this:
Nobody can PROVE I am more than just a conspiracy theory, but I DO exist! I DO! It IS possible to live for long periods of time without a phone!
While typing this a friend messaged me on Facebook and asked me to call him. I messaged another friend on Facebook and asked if I could use her phone later tonight to call the friend. DANG! Talk about ruining a perfectly good self-righteous rant!
But why must we call? Why do we need to Skype. Videochat? What's wrong with email? Texting? I still write LETTERS! And MAIL them! And wait months for a reply! Sometimes don't get one because nobody knows where to mail a letter to me. But I'm okay with that. So long as when we finally DO hook up on the phone, in a chatroom, texting or even, GASP, in person, we have good, quality time together. But this is not as easy as it is to just write down, is it? Not with the "Right Fucking Now" generation it's not! Ever see a group of youngsters get together and have deep, meaningful conversations? I don't. They meet up, go, "Hey. Sup?" "Sup?" Then they hang for hours together playing online games or chatting with other friends, and talking together about them a bit while they do so, until their phone battery dies and they are left to their very own conversational devices. Then it's, "Stupid I-phone bat life too short." "Me too. Later." "Yeah. Later."
It won't be long now until I'm a conversation teacher again in the most wired country in the world. This is what I'll have to contend with. It wasn't bad enough having the language barrier. Now it's a kind of social barrier. Will I have to learn to play League of Legends or Sudden Attack in order to reach my students? Will I have to be a sort of modern day Edward J. Olmos in "Stand and Deliver" and surprise the Korean students with my coolness by saying something to start off class like, "Okay Keemosabes, if you don't study for this test I will kill you faster than a Protoss Carrier can kill a Zergling."? THEN they'd dig me for sure! I might have to stop saying old folk things like "Keemosabe" and "dig" though.
Had a chat with Alex today. He's the young son of my good friends Scott and Minju, who I met while teaching in Korea. Alex was born in the year we taught at Chonnam University together. That was 2003/2004 so I think he's like 11 years old. I've known him his whole life.
Today during our chat he was trying very hard to convince me to download Skype. I don't like Skype. It has frozen my computer twice when I downloaded it and the third time when I downloaded it successfully it just stayed on all the time sucking valuable RAM up. It didn't work worth a shit when I used it and I used it once for a job interview then never used it again. So I nuked it and freed up some space. I didn't want to download it again just to chat with Alex. But he persisted. He practically begged me. He even suggested the gmail phone chat.
So I asked him why he wanted me to get an internet phone program so desperately. He said it was so that he could play a game while chatting. He says, "If we use facebook chat I'll have to pause my game and then I'll get killed 90 million times." No, it was more like, "If chat w u @ FB get killed 90M x! >:-(" Or something like that. I just said I would rather he put his entire concentration on the game then. So he says that he usually doesn't concentrate that hard on the game when he plays it. Not really getting my point. Then he asked a few more times for me to Skype up, and THEN commented on how boring the chat was and hit me with a deluge of Dispicable Me animated Minion emoticons one after another in rapid succession. A couple of other times he commented on how fast he could type hitting
return
after
each
word
he
typed
like
this
. There was even a point or two when he just randomly slammed a bunch of keys and I got messages like "pao8igfh[awegh."
I told him that no matter how annoying he tried to make the facebook chat, I still preferred it to Skype. And it was still a pleasure to talk to him. I love that boy and was very happy that he wanted to talk to me! So anyway, we said goodbye and he said we should chat again later. I said it might be too late for him since he's in Canada and I'm in Korea. He says I shouldn't worry because he'll be up till 2 AM. And up for school the next day! What a little madman!
Does it seem to you like the younger generation are living lives in fast forward? I guess this is nothing new from generation to generation, but I think it's even moreso, no? I find myself falling into the impatience trap once in a while too. My computer doesn't instantaneously get to the website and I curse and sigh and say something a spoiled child might say like, "AAaaawww come ON! This is taking for EVER!" Remember not so long ago when even the best internet slowly built the webpages? We were impatient back then too but we waited. Sometimes I find myself impatiently waiting for my turn in the conversation to speak and realize I haven't paid any attention to what the person speaking to me was saying. And usually it was something important or something that my statement makes obvious that I wasn't listening. "OH YEAH," I say, "And the man in the big, yellow hat!" "Dave, she was just talking about her friend, George who's bi-curious. Weren't you listening?"
Impatience can be death in conversation though too, can't it? This is why it puzzles me how patience is just not something people have the patience for any more. It's go, go , go at most jobs. Even the ones that require communication with other people. I suppose it's more common than ever to communicate the fast way, by text or telephone or Skype so you may not need the same level of patience, but sooner or later people have to talk to people and that can take a lot of patience. I am a slow talker. I like to craft a sentence in my head so that it may not be the most common way to get my point across. That takes time and sometimes hesitation. I find more people nowadays who will just barge right in on me mid sentence pretending like they thought I had finished my sentence when in actuality they just think I'm a drivelling idiot who has run out of batteries and wasn't worth listening to anyway. Needless to say, that bothers me. Most people who do this are young and I've learned that in a lot of cases, I'd say more than half, the reality is they just weren't listening to me. They were impatiently waiting for airtime.
Tolstoy said the two strongest warriors are Time and Patience. By that definition I have gotta conclude that this younger generation is getting weaker. We've heard them called the "Internet Generation." And we've heard the internet called the "social network." But I have to say, as far as social skills go, us old codgers have a lot to teach the young gaffers. Codgers, teach the gaffers patience. Twas always thus and always thus shall be. At least that's what I reckon.
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