When you never look up

The first day without my cell phone was the hardest. I couldn't check the time every five seconds. I couldn't immediately fix my boredom, but something else happened. I looked up.
It sounds silly, but think about every teenager you know, think about yourself. You are sitting by yourself, waiting for your friends for a few minutes, what do you do? You pull out your phone and text them to ask if they are on their way. you open Twitter to see if anything interesting is happening. At the very least you check the time to see if they're late, if you're early.
Beyond the obvious barrier of the communication you now feel towards the world around you, it's simple things like this that not having a cell phone in your back pocket eliminates. When you're standing by yourself waiting, you look around instead of looking down, you watch other people and how they act, you look at nature and how beautiful it gets in the spring. I did this very thing the other day, and for some reason it felt like people were looking at me funny.
The other night I went to dinner with some friends around 10pm. The restaurant wasn't packed but there were other tables scattered around the room, each with their own set of people going about their own lives, "interacting" with each other. The three people I was siting with all pulled out their phones. One looked down at their screen, laughed, then showed the other what was funny. My boyfriend, sitting next to me, texted his parents telling them when he'd be home. I sat, feeling a little left out and a little upset. Here I was, eager to have a real, interactive conversation. But I was left sitting alone, staring at the wall, the menu, and the people around me, who were all looking down, eyes lit up white by the light of their cell phones.
I mean I can't blame anyone for doing this because I myself was the same way a week ago. I would pull out my phone every minute there was a chance, but now I see how ridiculous I look. I think about people 20 years ago and how awesome it must have been to sit down with a group of people and be forced to talk, to have real conversations, to learn things about each other, undisturbed. I miss my phone, but I don't think I can ever go back to how I used to use it.

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