As time has gone on, I’ve become less and less of a phone person. When I was in middle school, I used to spend hours and hours on the phone when not studying or doing household chores. This was before I realized how lame that was because why would you spend all these hours on the phone with someone in your same city when you could just go spend time with him/her in person? In high school, I spent more time doing that – hanging out in person, whether at malls or walking through neighborhoods or at each others’ homes. Then through college and in the years after, I spent even less time on the phone. If I wasn’t on the phone with my then-boyfriends or my parents or Ed or another relative, I wasn’t on the phone at all.

It seems like this progression seems fairly normal, especially since it’s almost unheard of for people to call each other anymore because we live in a world dominated by texting and e-mailing — in other words, a world that is far more impersonal. When an old high school friend was visiting New York last month, he said he’d call me, and he actually did. I was honestly shocked (despite how stupid this sounds).

Tonight, for the first time since I could remember, I spent almost three hours on the phone with one of my best friends in San Francisco. Sure, I multi-tasked a little bit by doing things like flossing my teeth and creating scrapbook collages during our chat, but for the most part, we had a long, in-depth conversation about our latest activities, our families, our respective familial conflicts, and the future. It actually felt really nice. It reminded me of those middle school days when I felt so close to friends just by being on the phone with them. It’s scary to think how much time has passed since those days and the people that we’ve evolved into, and exactly how different our lives are now versus then. Yet we’re still connected, and we choose to be.