Calling a friend

It has been a while since I have had a long conversation on the phone with a friend, and it is not just because everyone has decided to drop out of the 'let's hang out and do nothing' scene in the late 20s, become too busy with our careers for mindless conversation, or are doing adult things like getting married and pregnant. It has to do with something much more basic. We just don't consider phone calls to be fashionable any more, which is a tragedy in my opinion.

As a teenager, phone calls were everything to me. I would spend hours chatting with the girl I like or spend time calling male friends to talk about homework, that new Street Fighter game, and well, girls. And this felt natural because everything was centred around the home phone. All of us had, or wish that we had, one of the two categories of what can best be described today as the pre-bluetooth era bluetooth devices for home phones.

The first of these devices is a pager. All of us owned or wished we owned a pager, (You are only a cool kid if your pager had polytones. This has not changed humans. Poly tones are still cool.) which we use to circumvent having to speak to each other's parents. Needless to say, I have once hailed the pager as the greatest invention to MANkind and dreamt of the days I no longer have to make up lousy answers to questions such as 'why are you calling my daughter at this time?'

The second device was cordless phones that were equally exciting because no longer shall parents sit curiously near the phone pretending to watch the TV, while lowering the volume to eavesdrop. A cordless phone could be hidden in the pillow and made it possible to lay on the bed, with one hand to the phone and the other flipping through magazine articles that we read to each other.

But like the bluetooth devices of today, cordless phones and pagers do little except enhance the home phone experience, and what an experience the era of phone calls were!

Phone calls are different from Texting, Instant Messaging, Tweets, Facebook statuses, and Instagram photos for many reasons.

One of them is the lack of AFK moments. There is absolutely no excuse for not being on the other side of the line. When the conversation have grown quiet or silent, callers make up things to say, they begin to describe what they are doing and they begin to imagine out loud what they wished to be doing instead. In fact, you always know when someone's friendship is a deal breaker when they simply lose interest on the phone and indicate the desire to be left alone. Over SMS, all you get is an ambiguous 'LOL' or an equally ambiguous 'AFK'.

But a more fundamental difference between phone calls and all the other alternatives today is the disjuncture between sound and image. When you see words on a screen, you mentally fill in the tone that was used, the implications of those words, and you inevitably overanalyse the text, imagining it to be an isolated and independent expression. Each piece of information stands alone in time without real references to the past or the future, and we scramble to unscramble these digital messages with a haphazardly sewn tapestry.

In a phone conversation, the medium is sound, and all sound gravitate towards the formation of harmony. When you're on the phone, you need to create an entire melody of words to convey your thoughts and feelings. If you're angry, you have to feed the beast of your anger with an amplification of your voice and the harshening of your tone over time. If you are in love, you have to serenade your love with the gentle dance of a ballad. A few false steps here and there only add to the 4'33 experience that we have so quaintly 'real experience'. Nothing is lost in the conversation's harmony.

Finally, a home phone is a social object. Even with pagers and cordless phones, the presence of others are never too far away from your mind. Your parents might be eavesdropping, their parents might be eaves dropping, the phone might be ringing too late at night, your conversation might be preventing people around from sleeping, and you can never really stop that family pet from distracting your sweetheart when you are trying to confess your love. (Yes Pepe, I have never forgiven your Chihuahua ass for distracting my girl.)

Today, I no longer have a landline in my house, instead my family owns three handphone lines, one for each member. Everything that I do on my phone is incredibly private. It is so private that if I send images of my privates to the internet, no one will ever know that it is me. And yet, despite all these privacy, I seem to have lost the ability to maintain any conversation. Every reply message is taking too long, and so I must start another conversation and another and another. In a strange turn of events, I grow scared of making phone calls and tire myself needlessly with questions such as 'what would I do if the conversation ran dry?' I am, at my core, a sad figment of what my brave 16 year old self once was.

In a world where smartphones are always on silent mode and instant messages secretly creeping up on us on the bottom of browsers instead of via 'notifications', we are living in an universe that is deafeningly silent. We neither hear another voice nor speak our own.

But as with all tragedies, it is faith and hope that would take us through. And so I would like to put my faith in the words of Rihanna, who once said "please don't stop the music", and my hope in that there is music left in us, which we could revive by keying in those sweet monotone melodies that link us to one another.

One last thing, we really should start making polytone key tones.