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I'm rarely in a position where I can actually answer my phone without being rude to someone else. Sometimes I look back and realize it's been weeks since I've actually been alone. With texting, I can at least get a sense of what's going on without interrupting what I'm doing.

I, like many people, am constantly on my phone.

We all know the feeling of surrendering to the embedded biases of our devices. We let our cell phones ping us every time there's an incoming message and check our e-mail even when we'd best pay attention to what's going on around us in the real world. We text while driving.

The way we're attached to our phones these days, they buzz and twitch in our pockets, and we have to look and see if it was a text, a voicemail, or an e-mail. We're almost like lab rats. I tried to eschew the whole cell phone theory until I had kids; then, I had to be reachable at all times.

For me, it's better to live without looking over your shoulder, worrying about who is controlling your phone, maybe poisoning your food.

I don't like being able to be reached. I enjoy my solitude. Even people having my phone number seems like too much.

Sometimes I eavesdrop on people. I could rationalize it - oh, this is good anthropological research for characters I'm writing - but it's basically just nosiness. It also helps me gauge where I'm at: Am I normal?

I text my girlfriends. I look at Facebook. I check my e-mail. If I'm away from the news cycle more than a few hours, I feel out of touch.

I'm old fashioned with my cell phone. I like that human contact and I think it's important.

I like texting as much as the next kidult - and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we live now in the post-aural age, when an unsolicited phone call is, thankfully, becoming more and more understood to be an unspeakable social solecism, tantamount to an impertinent invasion of privacy.