I’m sitting in a plane on the tarmac at Las Vegas Airport, and the door has closed and the woman next to me won’t stop texting. She’s young, or younger than me, anyway, 20s, 30s, and before she sat down in my row I helped shove her duffel bag into the overhead bin, from my seat, and the guy standing behind her did too, and she said “Thanks, team!” and I thought it was funny. But now I’m irritated. The door’s already closed — they’re “armed” or “secured” to use the quasimilitary jargon flight attendants like to drop on us, and even though we haven’t pulled away from the gate yet we’re supposed to have turned our phones off, or at least put them into airplane mode. There’s something prissy and narcish inside me when I see rules being broken. I sometimes am ashamed of this but other times I feel fully justified and think everything would be better if everyone were like me. I don’t actually for a minute think that the radio waves from the phone are going to crash the plane or anything like that; it’s the principle of the thing. I turned off my phone, like you’re supposed to, so why should other people get to play with theirs? I want to play on Facebook (I can see her playing on Facebook, out of the corner of my eye); I have people I want to text (now she’s texting, swapping back and forth between a couple different people). But I’m not. Because I’m not supposed to.

We’re moving up the runway now, and the flight attendants are all strapped in and there’s nobody to enforce order. She’s been on one text conversation for a while, and in spite of myself I’m trying to see what they’re saying. I can’t, really. She’s holding the phone down in her lap, and anyway, I turned 40 this year and in the past few weeks I’ve been starting to admit to myself that maybe restaurants aren’t bumping down the font sizes on the menu and lowering their lights for ill-advised aesthetic reasons. But then the last blue text bubble from her side is short and jumps out at me with sudden clarity: three emoji hearts and “we’re taking off”. The response bubble comes up almost right away, but instead of text, it’s the gently pulsating ellipsis that lets you know that a reply is in the works. It’s one of the cleverest decisions Apple ever made, to implement that little widget of functionality, assuming their goal is to get people to stare at their phones as much as possible, to feel every second of potential connection flowing through it, and why I don’t know why that would be their goal, exactly, I have no reason to believe it isn’t. The plane is starting to pick up speed now, but those three dots are still shimmering, and I feel intrusive but I don’t want to look away and I don’t want her to turn it off. The engine whine picks up and I realize that I’m not breathing. Then the reply, in tiny indecipherable letters, and she deftly switches over to airplane mode in a practiced series of swipes and then brings up a soduko game, and then I look away, embarrassed, thinking about how glad I am to see my wife again tonight. If anyone starts going on about how terrible cell phones are kids today need to stop staring at screens all the time, you tell them to go straight to hell.