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I Am So Popular: Driven To Distraction
A couple of weeks ago Warren and I went to see the movie Moon, sort of a thematic mash-up of that old classic Gaslight meets the Disney flick Parent Trap meets Castaway with a dash of A Boy and His Dog thrown in and some sub-themes that might’ve been derived from Bowie’s Major Tom and Elton’s Rocket Man. That I was able to gather all this from the film is a testament to my ability to multi-task. While it’s true I sometimes purposefully multi-task in the theater—yes, I can knit in the dark—in this case I found myself unintentionally and unhappily tri-tasking. Because the couple sitting next to us WOULD NOT SHUT THE FUCK UP.
So I sat there, trying to absorb myself in the sci-fi, but unable to do so, distracted the way one might be if, say, one was trying to have passionate sex while simultaneously listening to Abba and reciting pi to the nth degree. I couldn’t hear precisely what they were saying, but I could hear an internal dialogue banging against the walls of my skull as I debated how I might get them to shut up. And then I debated the merits of this. I thought about typing a message on my iPhone and showing it to them, indicating my frustration. More than once, I leaned over and stage whispered loudly to Warren, “The people next to me WILL NOT STOP TALKING,” hoping they’d hear me and this might do the trick.
It did not.
I did not allow myself to actually ask them to be quiet. Nor did I excuse myself to go track down a twelve year-old usher to do the deed for me. Because I figured that either of these options would mean that not only would I be cranky through the rest of the movie, so would the couple, ruining the evening for all three of us. And so, martyresque, I suffered mostly in silence. It really didn’t seem worth it to wreck their experience, simply because they were wrecking mine. Plus, I did not relish the thought of dirty looks that surely would be swapped when the lights came up. (For his part, Warren offered the brilliant solution, post-movie, that I should’ve just leaned over and casually joined in the conversation, startling them into silence.)
As I have great difficulty letting shit go—which, along with my insistence on multi-tasking means my ongoing attempts to embrace Buddhist philosophy remain fledgling at best—I continued to think about this incident long after it had passed. I got to wondering what had bothered me more—the actual talking or the fact that this couple was breaking the rules.
By applause, how many of you have, in your past, been called on by a teacher to write down names on the board of kids who talk while the teacher steps out for a few minutes? Did it give you a sense of power? Did you like the idea of being the Chosen One? Or did you fear being picked on by the others, threatened with certain punishment in the cafeteria or playground if you ratted the others out?
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve spent a lot of time in life wanting to break rules I thought were stupid and wanting to vigilantly uphold those that served me well. For instance, I, too, was a rule breaker that night at the movies. As we are wont to do, Warren and I are forever sneaking into a second movie. We do not do this at locally owned theaters but have no trouble justifying that occupying seats in a half-empty theater of some monster corporate megaplex harms no one. I know that somebody out there somewhere would be glad to tell us just how we, personally, are responsible for the current economic demise of the nation because of our behavior. And I stand ready to tell such a commentator to piss off. And, should I opt to resort to how I used to think in the old days, peppering my beliefs with on-the-spot self-righteous rationalizations, I might even say that we deserved a second movie for free since those idiots ruined the first one by yapping incessantly. Which is to say I determined that my rule breaking was perfectly fine while theirs was not.
And now, in one of my famously confusing segues, let me tie this movie experience and the attendant days of over-rumination that followed to cell phones and driving. Last week, NYT ran a story about studies that show that texting and talking while driving has been found to be on par with drunk driving. Maureen Dowd picked up on the theme in her column, confessing that once while she was driving and on her phone she rear-ended someone. (A more dramatic example, told in the reported story, tells of the young kid who didn’t just rear end a driver, he killed her because he was on the phone.)
In the days since I was a teenager in Jersey, when the drinking age was 18 (up until, damn the luck, ten days before I turned 18, at which point it turned to 19, up until ten days before I turned 19, at which point it turned to 21), drinking and driving was hardly frowned upon. Oh no, it was practically a required high school rite of passage. I used to throw back a six-pack, or countless shots of Jack, and swerve around in my ’64 Valiant, not even contemplating that this might be a bad idea.
This is behavior that continued on, unfortunately, into my thirties. I do not look back with humor or relief that I survived, unscathed, having never wrapped my car around a pole or hurt anyone else. Instead, I look back in abject horror, often imagining that karma dictates that one of these days I am going to meet my maker courtesy of some blind-drunk kid that hits me head-on. (If and when this happens, let me say, for the record, I do hope compassion and a chance at rehab will be extended to this kid.)
It took a long time for attitudes about drunk driving to change, for designated drivers to become commonplace rather than novel. Long before my kid hit adolescence, I had drilled it into his head and the heads of his friends that if they ever, ever, ever, ever found themselves either drunk or stuck in a situation with a driver that was drunk they should call me, even if it was the middle of the night, even if they were six states away, at which point I would either personally drive out to get them or pay for a cab, even if it cost two thousand dollars.
This was not, as some might argue, me offering them support in underage drinking. It was me having the sort of conversation adults did not have with kids when I was a kid. (And it worked as, one day, I was called upon to find the friend of a friend of my kid, a girl who’d wandered off campus midday, gotten drunk with strangers, and woke up disoriented in an HEB parking lot way up north.)
Do you text and drive? Talk on the phone and drive? I do. I shouldn’t. I want to stop. I’m going to try. But it is far too easy to rationalize that I am not a problem driver-texter. It’s those other people, the ones who don’t have nearly my experience on the road, my amazing multi-tasking skills. This is the same rationale I used those rare times I did stop to think about how my driving-post-cocktails was maybe not the smartest idea.
If somebody smashes into me, though, and I find out they were on the phone, I might not demand they be locked up for life, but I certainly will begin the story with, “This asshole was on the phone driving when…” So, once again, it comes down to us interpreting the rules in a way that best suits us.
I'm listening to the audiobook of Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Art of Power right now, in which the rock god of Buddhist monks extols the virtues of uni-tasking, the benefits of focus and concentration, the power of being fully present in each and every moment. This is beyond a lofty goal for most all of us. Even as I listen, and nod my head in agreement, I am doing so while simultaneously walking the dogs and creating a mental to-do list for the rest of the day. Elvis was known for the motto TCB (Takin’ Care of Business) and, similarly, I have, with pride, named my own favorite acronym as GSD (Gettin’ Shit Done). I can talk on the phone, write an email, smoke a cigarette, and go over the next ten things I’ll be doing all at once. I can drive and text and listen to Fresh Air while planning a fundraiser in my mind.
What I cannot seem to do anymore is one thing at a time. Which, from a Buddhist perspective, ruins any chance of living in the moment, and from a theater-goers experience can mean not getting to enjoy a flick because we’re focused on the loudmouths next to us, and, on a more dangerous note, can mean that any second now we will literally or metaphorically crash into someone unintentionally. I think I’ll obsess over this the next time I’m simultaneously reading a magazine, taking a crap, talking to the dogs, and planning what’s for dinner.
Spike Gillespie hopes you’ll be quiet at the movies. She blogs at KnitBuzz and www.spikeg.com. She is less than one hundred friends away from FaceBook whore status. And she’s teaching a writing workshop soon—email spike@spikeg.com for details.
