The World Is Shrinking

Oh, Journal, I know you'll forgive my absence but I needed a break from the machine.  So let me tell you about what happened on this morning's walk.  As you know, I walk every morning, down the sidewalk of my City.  I was paced just right as I noticed a woman to my right, up about 50 feet, holding her left hand to the side of her head, with her head bent down and her body position odd.  She had her right side to me.  I thought, oh wow this woman is having a migraine attack, I've seen them they're horrendous!  Firmly grasping my cane, I quickly limped up toward her, ready to assist, which is the frustrated doctor in me.  I was about 10 feet away when I heard her talking, and then as I got closer, suddenly she reared her head back and let out a sound something like a psychotic scream but, in hindsight, I see now was a laugh.  I stood there staring at this woman who was not, as I imagined, having a migraine, but holding a cell phone to her ear and enjoying a good joke with someone.  I was startled into a rabbit-in-the-headlights kind of paralysis.  Then I slowly turned my head, noting my surroundings more closely.  Look, there's a man talking away to what appears to be no one; something's stuck inside his ear.  There's a kid with an iPod wrapped in his own personally programmed bubble, not having to listen to anything he didn't want to.  Wherever I turned, a cell phone, an iPod, something that kept strangers out was in use by people who kept their heads down, their eyes averted.  Were they acting in their own movies, soundtrack and all?  We've developed a method of acting in life without interacting with life-forms.  It's just incredulous to me, I mean at least with a Walkman you could still hear people when they talked, but people wearing these "ear buds" are telling the world "You don't count."  People talking on cell phones most likely have a very important reason to do so.  Being disabled I should probably have one myself.  But it's on the bus, when I hear, "Yeah I'm about 2 minutes away" that I realize how these things are being used mostly to keep us pinned to our separate worlds, our own self-made environs.  This is all superb technology.  I just wonder what the next personal bubble will be.