Hard 2 Get

Does abstinence make the heart grow fonder? How about calmer?

As our “devices” own us ever more, we hear talk of digital fasting and abstinence. (It’s curious how in America the primary meaning of “device” is an electrical invention connected to the internet, a meaning that supersedes older denotations such as scheme, trick, plan, rhetorical tool, or signifying mark. It is also instructive that the roots of the word go back to both “discourse” and “division.”)

Don’t be alarmed. This is not a sermon preaching a Luddite message of unplugging, however worthy that be.

This is something else.

Does the less you connect make you that much more coveted? The novelist Thomas Pynchon is legendary for his elusiveness, his absence. Photographs of the author are rare. J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, was famously anonymous, to use an oxymoron, even though he was living in plain sight in Cornish, New Hampshire. Their unreachability presumably made reaching out to them all the more alluring. When we see a sign that warns us to avoid “WET PAINT,” we want to touch it.

I have a friend, who happens to be a writer, who has never had and does not now have a cellphone. That makes him singular in my universe. (Actually, not so: my mom, 101 years old, had a cellphone she never used and does not have one now.)

Does this lack of a device make such people “special”? I have my doubts. From my vantage, such folks surrender such status by relying on other cellphone users to breach the digital divide.

My personal history in this vein is inconclusive. I resisted owning a smartphone because I thought the device would own me. I surrendered in 2015. Although upgrading my phone had little to do with feeling either more or less connected, I couldn’t be special anymore by smugly declaring, “Oh. I don’t own a cell. You kidding? Not me.”

I would suggest that the business world and the personal world abide by different social norms regarding digital abstinence, fasting, and promptness — a category similar to fasting, though paucity and duration are different aspects.

As for my own personal world, my data set is a small sample: one person with a limited circle of family, ex-wives and girlfriends, friends, and acquaintances.

I aim for a daily text to my children. Some days I miss. If any of us were to go silent for more than a day, two the most, we would find a need to check in more actively.

What about intimate friends (there’s a euphemism if there ever was one)? What are the 21st century protocols — if any — for response rapidity and frequency? What is the fine line between playing hard to get and crossing over into the phenomenon of ghosting? Is the notion of “hard to get” an ancient artifact of another century?

If I am interested in someone, my obsessive personality makes it nearly impossible to refrain from checking my phone (ahem, device) for any morsel of communication at any hour of day or night or under any circumstance, time, or place.

Is this constant temperature gauging an infinite neurosis, or merely the commonplace anxiety of the modern age?

Send me a text. Now. Don’t leave me waiting.

pebble in the shoe

I put on my socks, yellowish, thin, summery. Then, I covered my left foot by slipping on a shoe, a handsome brown dress shoe, from Famous Footwear. I put on my right shoe. (Truthfully, this sequence may be imposed after the fact. I cannot recall for sure.) Then I felt a pebble in my left shoe. It was an annoyance. It was less than a pebble; call it a pebblette. I removed the shoe and shook it. Nothing seemed to fall out. And I couldn't feel anything with my naked hand as it surveyed the shoe for the culprit. I put the left shoe back on. I walked on it. Pebble (or pebblette) still in the shoe. Problem still afoot, though invisible and not tactile. It has been said such a petty bother can unsettle a person, that it can drive someone (even an abstinent person) to drink. I held that notion in my head to nudge me toward some calmness as expletives prepared to explode into the room peopled only by the author of this blog post. I recalled the broken shoelace and its aftermath chronicled in The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. I removed the offending scruple, "again," this time with more comfortable results (as evidenced by a test-walk). 

The metaphorical applications of this vignette await your parsing.

This, from the Online Etymology Dictionary, may help you in your reflections:

scruple (n.)

"moral misgiving, pang of conscience," late 14c., from Old French scrupule (14c.), from Latin scrupulus "uneasiness, anxiety, pricking of conscience," literally "small sharp stone," diminutive of scrupus "sharp stone or pebble," used figuratively by Cicero for a cause of uneasiness or anxiety, probably from the notion of having a pebble in one's shoe. The word in the more literal Latin sense of "small unit of weight or measurement" is attested in English from late 14c.

ties that bind, or loosen...

...around the collar, that is.

For eight weekdays in a row now, I've worn a tie, a different tie each day. Jaunty ties, dressy ties, sober ties. No bow ties yet, though I have a very fine, handmade collection of bow ties.

Why this sartorial binge?

I'm not entirely sure of why I embarked on this experiment. I didn't see myself embarking on anything, really; it just happened into a habit. So far.

Perhaps I was inspired by the mother of my daughter's friend, who wore a different dress for 30 straight days. And then created a blog to tell about it. But this is different. I work at home. I could theoretically stay in my pajamas till noon, or later. And I won't publicly say whether I have accomplished that feat (speaking of feet, don't you just love pajamas with feet? No, I don't have those). I also often work on weekends, during which I don't shave or wear a tie, except for church. Episcopalian.

It is simply too facile to say I did it (or am doing it) to be more "professional," to exemplify the thinking that says: If you are making sales calls or telemarketing, wear a suit. I don't know if I've ever bought into that, whether it is empirically fruitful or as productive as making calls with a tin-can-and-string phone.

But I have had a good week or so. 

So who knows?

Another tie tomorrow, for a meeting in the morning. Who knows, maybe even a second tie for another meeting in the afternoon. You may call that "tying one on," but if I were to tie one on in the sense of abdicating an abstinence of many years, one day at a time, I'd be truly tie-died, tied-dead, three sheets to the wind, in my winding sheet -- to put it in jejune Joycean terms.