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Archives from 2002-2006

I was leaving the gym the other day and came upon an older lady in the hall who had approached a young muscle-y dude. I could hear her asking him if he worked there. He shook his head dismissively without looking at her and continued on to the water fountain, while she said to his back, “Oh, sorry. I was just going to ask a question.” He got his drink and left, without ever making eye contact.

I was thinking about this as I got in my car and headed home: how at a certain age women just become invisible to men, especially young men. The visual assessment system doesn’t even get deployed, we don’t even register. So many years being weighed on a scale of desire, then a permanent re-categorization into the wholly uninteresting land of the Unfuckable.

I see it happening with me more and more as I get older. It’s like becoming a ghost: a little more translucent as each year passes by.

It feels embarrassing and dumb to mourn this fact. Like, if it bothers me, then I’m buying into it, right? But how do you even pick apart what you truly think as opposed to what you’ve been told all your life you’re supposed to think? How do you learn to value your own worth without factoring in all the bullshit analytics that come with being a female?

In retrospect, I wish I had stopped and talked with that woman. Maybe I could have helped her, or at least pointed her towards someone who could. Seems like instead of giving a single fuck whether I show up on some dick-based radar, that’s the sort of thing that actually matters.

From what I’ve been told — multiple times, often accompanied by dramatic hand gestures — Riley is the only student in his entire middle school who doesn’t have a phone. Yes, literally every other kid has one, even that one guy who threw his phone on the ground on purpose when he was mad and shattered the screen, even he has a new one. Even his friend’s little sister has a phone and she’s only in third grade. But not Riley! He’s just expected to wander the halls, phoneless, like a total peasant.

I get it, the phone-longing. It’s true most kids do seem to have one, in his grade and even in Dylan’s class. Everyone’s texting, everyone has Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube accounts. Even if Riley wasn’t surrounded by peers with iPhones, he only has to look up in his own house to get the idea that staring at a tiny screen must be a pretty compelling activity.

There are responsibility-related reasons I’m not eager to give him a phone, like the fact that both kids have those Gizmo Gadget watches and we have to nag constantly about remembering to keep them charged or remembering to wear them period. Or the fact that he is famous for dropping, misplacing, spilling liquid into, or otherwise ruining various objects from throw pillows to iPod Shuffles.

But if I’m honest with myself, my reluctance actually has very little to do with the inevitable repair/replacement fee. It’s more about … the potential for unhappiness, I guess.

You know what I mean? The kind of overly-plugged-in life we try not to live when we’re connected 24/7, but it’s kind of a struggle for grown-ass adults so how can we expect kids to manage it? Even with time limits, it’s a siren call that never goes away. The time-wasting scrolling, the endless waves of bite-sized content, the updates and arguments and unrealistic images and misread communications. The pull away from being in the moment in favor of documentation. The increasing fear that if we are not acknowledged with hearts and likes we may not exist at all.

Okay, it’s possible I am getting a little Black Mirror about this when the reality is that he just wants to play Goat Simulator more often. Still, there is a world I am deeply familiar with — the one in which my phone is a bottomless well of distractions, one that allows me to fade out of my real life whenever I want in favor of mental and physical immobility — and there’s a world I can only imagine, where kids’ social lives are whiplashed by each other’s texts and posts and check-ins and jesus, wasn’t it bad enough when the grapevine was limited to whispers in a hallway?

Anyway. Riley is hoping 13 is the magic number for him, phonewise. Me, I’d rather wait … but until when? When is the right age to say here, here is a thing I use all the time, that I sort of never wanted you to have.

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