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OK, so I’m supposed to be in bed reading Red Storm Rising, since we watched tonight’s episode of Alias upstairs. Of course, something brought me downstairs after the show (I got something in the mailbox that I wanted to check out, but forgot to earlier), when I saw the Peapod bag in which I had put all of my iPod stuff.

After checking the letter I received and finding it not to be what I expected, I took the iPod out and started taking pictures of things with the digital camera I bought Chris for Christmas. You see, I’m planning on putting the iPod up on eBay sometime next week (you’ll be able to see the photos in another post). When I downloaded the photos to my computer, I also downloaded the other photos from the camera, since it was hooked up.

Looking at the photos Chris took while she was down at U of I for Theater Fest, I realized that I picked out the perfect point-and-shoot for her. I mean, Chris is not the best still photographer, but the pictures she took were pretty good as far as image quality and resolution were concerned. I came across one image in particular that I liked, and I’ve cropped it to a composition-type image:

I liked this photo because it is indicative of the way our society has become so dependent upon the notion of always being connected to one another. When I was in high school, I managed to convince my parents that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to have a pager. The plus for them was that they could always page me, since neither they nor I knew where I was going to be most of the time. The plus for me was that anyone could reach me, and I could choose who I wanted to call back. I remember the days of getting paged by "007" (Scott) and "008" (Chris). And of course, it completely escapes me what Hersch’s code was at the time, but that’s probably because we were always together.

I had a StarTAC phone for a couple of years, too. Again, I could always be reached, and I could always reach someone else (much to the surprise of my mom when she received my often times $100+ cell phone bills). This was all before everyone and their newborn baby had a cell phone permanently attached to their heads. Which brings me to one of my points: when did it become the norm for everyone to have a damned cell phone?

After losing my StarTAC to heavy rains one summer during the Taste of Chicago, I didn’t replace it with another phone for almost two years. When I did replace it, it was only because I wanted to have a phone to be notified in case something happened with my dad, who was very ill at the time with liver cancer. Even then (it was the fall of 2000), it still wasn’t exactly commonplace to have a cell phone. Then slowly but surely, over the next year I started seeing cell phones everywhere.

By the summer of 2001, it looked like everyone had a cell phone, and the cellular providers were offering plans with hundreds of minutes a month for about the same cost as a broadband connection. With these plans you had long distance included at no additional charge, which was a huge money saver for me since my family and Chris’s were in the 847 area code, but we lived in the 309 area code at school.

When Chris and I moved into our apartment, we almost didn’t even bother getting a land line because we both had cell phones and rarely used our families’ phone lines when were lived at home. We did end up getting a land line simply to ensure that we could make and receive calls when our cell phones weren’t under their "peak operating conditions." Now, that’s not even a strange phenomenon for someone to only have a cell phone and not a land line.

Anyways, I’ve rambled on for far too long. I should really get some sleep. I plan on working out in the morning. Those plans tend to go south when I don’t get to bed by 11pm.