A Metamorphosis

I was one of those high school kids who spent more time doodling in the margins of my algebra notebook than solving for x. In English class, the first drafts of my essays often took the form of illustrations. Before I could put my analysis of, say, Kafka's Metamorphosis into words, I had to work out my thoughts from the book in pictures: Gregor Samsa's shadowy bedroom, the crooked legs of the insect he had become. It was as though I could not truly understand my own ideas until I had drawn them.

I filled copious notebooks in this way, yet against every teacher's and mentor's advice, I never took an art class. In my adolescent restlessness, I didn't have the patience for sketching sneakers, flowers, the tree in the school courtyard. My favorite artistic subjects had more in common with the comic books and superhero stories I loved so much as a child than with what I saw as the more mundane assignments of the high school art room. But when I looked at many of those beloved comic books again, the stories seemed fl at and empty, at least compared to the rich and startling worlds I had begun to encounter in so many novels. My own drawings, too—as much as I tried to force them to eloquence—remained little more than loud-mouthed cartoons, cavemen grunting and swinging clubs, devoid of language. There was something I needed to express, but I had no idea how to do it.

One afternoon, instead of following my friends to the diner where in the last year we had started spending most of our after-school time, I ducked into the comics shop on the corner. When I was between the ages of eight and thirteen, that shop window had exerted an almost supernatural force on me. The bright covers, bold titles, and the promise of vicarious adventure: every dollar I spent there bought a ticket to another reality. But at some point, I lost interest, moved on to other things. I had not been inside in years.

I can't say what it was that pulled me there again—luck or intuition, boredom or nostalgia—but in retrospect, it is clear that whatever force was at work, that day marked the beginning of my own metamorphosis. When I pushed through the familiar doors into the fluorescent-lit store, I saw that not much had changed: the same long rows of shelves along the walls, the same meticulously organized bins of comics down the center. I made my accustomed rounds, my fingers searching the bins and my eyes searching the shelves for anything new, but before I made it very far, I noticed a small crowd gathered in a back corner. They lingered near a table, where a pale, bespectacled man sat with a stack of books in front of him and a pen in his hand, signing the copies they thrust his way and making polite chitchat.

I sidled up to the table, slid a book off the stack, and moved to the periphery of the store. Leaning against a bookshelf with the deliberate and painfully self-conscious detachment so often performed by adolescents, I perused the book's opening pages. My willful indifference did not last long.

This book was like nothing I'd ever seen: a story told in frames and images, just like so many comics I'd read as a kid, but instead of the contrived plotlines and cartoonish heroes I'd since lost patience with, the hero of this story was an ordinary guy, struggling with the same life-and-the-universe questions I was. The drawings, which seemed both spontaneous and precise, leant a kind of ecstatic grandeur to the hero's small story.

I looked again at the quiet, unassuming man sitting at the table, patiently signing his books and addressing his little handful of fans. How did he do it, and more than that, how could I learn to do it?

Immediately, I moved toward the table. He peered at me over his spectacles and held out a hand to take the book I was shaking at him like I thought maybe he had never seen his own work before.

"What's your name, son?" he said.

"Rob," I blurted, and while I was casting around for some coherent way to ask this man what I wanted to ask, he somehow beat me to it.

"Do you draw, Rob?" I nodded. Without missing a beat, he said, "Well, let's see something. What can you show me?"

I pulled a notebook out of my bag and fl uttered the pages open to the drawings I'd done of Kafka's Metamorphosis. He gazed at these a while and then looked through the notebook for others, stopping at each drawing he found, giving each one such careful attention.

"These are very fine," he said, and I must have looked like I didn't believe him, because he said it again, emphatically.

"But how do I learn to do what you do?" I gestured helplessly at the stack of books. "How do I make something as good as this?"

He handed over my notebook on the tips of his fingers, as though he were handling something as fragile as glass, and gave me an astonishingly simple piece of advice that would be one of the most important of my career:

"Take it seriously," he said, "and put in the time."

And that's exactly what I've done, every day since.

More Communication Needed

Picture this: a family is out to dinner at a favorite restaurant, waiting for the food to arrive. Rather than having a lively or even boisterous conversation with one another, each one of them is silently looking down at a smartphone while emailing, texting, or having conversation with someone who is not present. The food finally comes, and the family continues to gaze at their devices throughout the meal, without saying a word to one another. This is not a fictional situation. It is one that I witnessed just the other day. Chances are good that if they were sitting with the person they are texting or emailing, they would be emailing or texting someone else! This scene is likely not very diffi cult to imagine. There is a good chance you have either witnessed a similar scene or have even been in it yourself.

More and more people use cell phones, smart phones, and laptops to communicate via texting, emailing, and messaging. People carry their smartphones with them everywhere and use them doggedly. Technology makes our lives easier, so we tend to believe it makes us better. But does it really make us better? Are we missing something by replacing our face-to-face communication with electronic communication? In my opinion, the answer is a capitalized Y-E-S.

Think about what plays into communication when you talk to someone face to face as opposed to electronically. You get to read a person’s body language, watch facial expressions, hear a person’s tone of voice and its inflection, and watch a person’s eyes. All of these clues contribute to how we understand what is being said as well as how we are understood. Electronic messages can be misunderstood, misspelled, and misread. All this “missing” harms our communication and, inevitably, our communication and social skills. When we communicate face to face, we also, naturally improve at it.

Have you ever looked someone in the eyes while that person told you something that you knew wasn’t true? It is nearly effortless to hide true feelings and emotions behind typewritten words, abbreviations, and smiley-faced emoticons. With face-to-face contact, it is not so simple to hide the truth. Face-to-face communication provides people with more honest communication. And isn’t that the most important part of understanding one another?

One of the most fragile groups in terms of communication is teenagers. Throughout the teenage years, communication skills are being developed, built, and fostered. A report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in 2011 found that teenagers’ number one method of communicating is by text. The report also said that people between the ages of twelve and seventeen text about sixty times per day. This means that teenagers are opting for less face-to-face contact and more digital communication to say what they want to say.

Teenagers who are using electronic communication for the bulk of their communication are surely missing out on essential skill building. This can lead to damaged friendships and relationships and even hinder new friendships and relationships from forming.

Failing to become skilled at face-to-face communication can also severely hurt a young person’s opportunities for employment in the future. Most employers expect employees to easily and naturally have face-to-face conversations. They expect prospective employees to be able to look a person in the eye and “connect” in that way. Many employers will not hire someone who struggles with face-to-face conversations or fails to make meaningful eye contact when speaking. If teenagers do not develop these absolutely essential communication skills, their future career paths will surely be hindered.

Is there a solution to this deterioration of communication skills? We should all make an effort to focus on the face-to-face encounters we do have. And every once in a while, we should put down the phone or log off our laptop and say what we want to say in person, to someone’s actual face. And if we are out to dinner, we should put down the phone and try to enjoy some social time with the person sitting right in front of us by using our body language, facial expressions, eyes, and most of all, our spoken words.

The Cell Phone Trend

You see them everywhere. You may own one. They ring at the worst times, in quiet theaters or right in the middle of lunch. Cellular phones: they are the symbol of contemporary communication. Some people think they are a nuisance. Others think they are indispensable. Have you ever wondered just how these little phones work? They consume so much of our lives. Maybe we should take a moment to understand them better.

A cellular phone is a combination of a radio and a telephone. Before the cell phone, people used "radio telephones." This was possible because there was one antenna tower in each city. That tower had 25 channels available for communication. This limited amount of channels allowed only a few people to use radio telephones.

Now we have an improved cellular phone system. Each city is divided into communication "cells." Each "cell" has its own tower and a building where all the radio equipment for that tower is held. Each cell phone company has 832 radio frequencies per city. That means there are about 56 voice channels per "cell." That's a big improvement on the radio telephone system! With the digital system, the number of channels is greater—168 channels per cell! Technology has come a long way. CB radios used to be the high–tech way to talk on the road, but a CB radio only has 40 channels. Now a typical cell phone has 1664 channels or more. Communication has never been easier.