Feeling Old

Last Wednesday, my wife and I did something unusual - we dropped off our son at her mom's house and drove 2 hours to the U of I campus to see Dave Matthews Band in concert. I'm not a big fan of concerts, honestly, so I won't attempt to review this one, because it's probably skewed by my own stay-at-home tendencies.

I do have this to say, however. I was on a college campus for the first time since I graduated, and although I'm only 3 1/2 years removed from that same stage in life, I felt old. I looked around at these (dare I say it?) kids, and I felt totally and completely out of place. One of the biggest factors in that feeling was the prolific cell phone use that I observed. The three students in front of me used their cells phones throughout the concert to talk and text message, and as I looked around I saw lots and LOTS of others doing the same. I couldn't even hear my wife talking, and she was sitting right next to me!

I remember that when I started college, cell phones hadn't so completely infiltrated our society. When I was a freshman or sophomore, one of my suite-mates acquired a cell phone and started using that exclusively to make calls, and would give out his number to others. I remember thinking how weird that was.... and now you can't walk down the street without seeing a million people on their cell phones. Hell, you can't even shop for groceries without listening to someone's conversation, and for some reason I find that super annoying; much more annoying than listening to two people having a conversation in front of me. I wonder if that's a common annoyance, or if I'm alone. Thoughts?