Texting

My bus arrives at school fifteen minutes before I need it to and I am left waiting for class to start for the duration of those fifteen minutes on a daily basis. I often sit on a bench in the hallway waiting for my music class to start. Today, the benches were occupied, so I stood next to them and stared at the wall with the intention of doing so until the current class in session let out and we could enter the auditorium and take our seats, but a girl came and stood right in front of the spot I was staring at. I could not very well stand there glaring into her face for fifteen minutes, so I pretended to be interested in other areas of the hallway. Eventually, this became a tiresome task and rather than pretend to be interested in the little knick knacks on the walls and behind the display case, I pretended that I had some pressing matter to tend to and I went outside where I found a spot in the sun to sit and wait for class to begin.

Campus is without fail exceedingly busy at this time of day and there was an infinite river of human bodies flowing in a multidirectional current, much of which came my way. Something in us is opposed to the idea of sitting and staring into oblivion in front of people. Perhaps it makes us feel stupid. I really can’t identify any reason it should be an issue, but I know I am not the only one who feels this way.

I used a very popular method to remedy this uncomfortability. I pulled my cell phone out of my backpack and texted people out of boredom. I could have used the keyboard to accelerate the process of texting, but I opted to use the much slower, alphabetized numeric keypad on the face of my phone. I had time to kill. As slowly as possible, I formed some meaningless message and then sent it to my sister, who often exploits me in the same manner.  

I’ve seen others do this as well. They don’t know what else to do. They do not want to sit and stare, because for some reason that is lame, so they haul out their cell phones and maybe fumble around with them a little before finally texting somebody just because. I do not think it’s an attention deficit because I personally could sit and stare for hours, thinking about any number of things, without becoming anxious. I think that a possibility is that even the best of us feel some measure of anxiety in public – even if it be subconscious and unnoticed anxiety – and being fidgety, we feel as though we must do something.

Doesn’t matter anyway. Just some speculation.