Letters to the Editor
chimpygo
Published Letters: 79 Editor's Choice: 1
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haters, haters, here in luddite land
[Read the article: My wife is terrible on the cellphone!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Golly, there sure seem to be a lot of readers just waiting to tee off on hapless LW for one reason or another:
1) You're a meanie to be annoyed by your wife/wife's behavior
2) I don't like cell phones, therefore your problem doesn't matter
3) How dare you not like texting? I'm older, and I have no such problem
4) Driving and talking can be dangerous (p.s. I see no distinction between driving while speaking and driving while typing on a 3 inch "keyboard")
5) As a general rule,I am superior to people and like to attempt rhetorical displays of dominance
This is only suprising because I've come to expect such thoughtful and intelligent responses to this column, many of which are as worth reading as Cary's (which I'm a big fan of, even if I don't always agree).
Maybe we could lighten up, not grind our own axes (egads! guilty) quite so vigorously, perhaps even engage the main idea?
Cell phone trouble: It's not the world's greatest existential dilemma, but if it affects your daily life, it could be worth thinking about and trying to solve.
My dear mother (50s, tech savvy in many other regards) and I have similar comm breakdowns on cellphones. For the longest time, she didn't "get it" when a call was dropped.
When I called back I would be greeted with a flurry of loud-talk hello-hellos which drowned out my own attempts at speech.
Finally she would laugh nervously and say--as though using Martian technology for the first time--"What happened?!"
Things are improving, and I think a combination of humor, patience, and technical understanding will help them get even better.
Thanks a bunch for the people with insight into mic placement, background sounds, and voice-feedback. Knowing these things will make it easier to converse with someone I love using spoken language, which is a worthy enough goal, I suppose.
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one cheerleader/beefcake for now, and a companion for the road
[Read the article: The artful seducer]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I know a guy who does exactly this and it works like a charm. He's usually more self-parodic than straight-up obnoxious, but all kinds of lines get blurred and he charms intelligent feminist women with outrageous sexed up behavior.
It's foolishly reductive to say we're only instincts, but naive to pretend new age enlightenment blots out millions of years of desire for strength, comfidence, or a body well-suited for birthing.
One woman, I noticed, took to task a "nice guy" who lamented that the women he was interested in always went after "jerks." Maybe, she suggested, he should've screwed up his courage and made a move. But--if we're all just human beings here--why must the man (a "real" man) make the first move?
Generally speaking, it's true that women are attracted to money and power and men to youth and boobs. It's also true, of course, that we're all attracted to individual human beings for their unique personalities...
Maybe the task for us as people is to acknowledge and try to understand the forces that drive us, then try to reconcile them with our higher aspirations.