I've always hated talking on the phone, mostly because telephonic conversation seems to consist mostly of accidentally talking over each other and having to stop and say "sorry, what?" To me this seems like a flaw inherent to the design of the telephone; you can't see the other person, so you have no indication when they are about to start talking. Online chatting lacks this feedback as well, but the software enforces serialization and cleanly puts the messages one after the other. Talking on the phone is sort of like chatting with a program that prints the messages as soon as you type them, even if the other person sent something at exactly the same time. That kind of conversation would have exactly the same problems. So with such a critical design flaw, I just don't understand how the telephone has gotten so popular. It seems like it should have been a flash in the pan invention that quickly fizzled, like the pogo ball.

That said, tonight I had not one, but two telephone conversations of reasonable length, with no purpose other than social interaction. And it was kind of nice. There were no awkward pauses as both sides struggle to think of something to say. I wonder why sometimes it's easy to have conversations and sometimes nothing comes to mind. I think a big part of it is the fact that it had been a while since I'd talked with each of them, so there were new things to talk about. I guess it's kind of like playing music; when you haven't played in a few days, and you sit down at the drums or whatever and start playing, you find yourself coming up with interesting things and you thinking, "Man, I wish I were recording this." So you stop and you go set up the four-track, and then you play again and it's boring and cliche'd.

Wait, no, talking on the phone isn't anything like that.