I’m at the beautiful Beverly Hilton standing on line to pickup my credentials for the Golden Globes on Sunday. Geez, there are a lot of people here. Are they giving credentials to every Mom Blogger on the planet? Wait, they are giving a credential to me so I should just shush.

So, as the line winded near the beautiful valet rotunda in Beverly Hills like some kind of surreal Dr. Seuss a was left with the rare treat of waiting and wondering.

What ever happened to those extinct delights of everyday life?

One might call them the disappearing Ws. Before the technological age that is now omnipresent and so integral of our lives (and has become our lives ) we waited. And the wondered. You waited in line…at the bank…the DMV…the checkout counter at Macy’s. We were ultimately lost in our own thoughts. There were no iPhones or smartphones or LED news crawls to mindlessly occupy us like we were toddlers searching for a pacifier or a six year-old needing the distraction of something shiny.

Nobody just stands and waits anymore.

Back then you might just might idle conversation with your linemates while waiting. People used to ask, “Excuse me do you have the time?” Now everyone has the time, all of the time!  People would say, “It sure looks like rain, eh?” Now

we’re two clicks from a detailed seven-day forecast on the Weather Channel app that comes standard on every Apple mobile device. Challenge someone to wait three minutes in line without touching their iPhone. Ninety seconds in, they’ll start fidgeting like some sort of heroin addict. Shame.

It is because of the smartphone and the Internet and its instant access to all that we have also forgotten the wonder of wondering. The phrase “bar room conservation” harks to a time where friendly debate took place because some questions were not instantly knowable:

“I wonder who sculpted Mount Rushmore?” and how long that took for someone to divine an answer.

“I wonder who won the Stanley Cup in 1942?”

“I wonder who was behind all those groundbreaking Esquire covers of the sixties and seventies?”

Now there are undoubtedly readers that already click clicked and accessed that info in seconds. Is that really fun? You can’t even make a decent bet anymore. Everybody can know everything instantly. How boring is that?

Who’s doing that crossword puzzle? You or Siri?

Actually intelligence is crashing through the floor because everyone has artificial intelligence. Pre-Internet you would have set the room abuzz if you were the one person who knew Mount Rushmore was sculpted by father and son Gutzon and Lincoln Borglum. The entire international education community system will gradually disintegrate as it dawns on people the magic wand is right in the palm of their hand.

I had a colonoscopy the other day. It was performed by a nine year-old with a do-it-yourself surgery app. (Well, not really, but it sure seems like it’s coming. Yet I digress…)

Any idiot can know everything now. The only thing that can’t be Googled is how to regale in the fine art of small talk while you wait, and wonder.

And with that little rant, I’m next; time to pick up my credentials.

Well worth the wait.

See you on the red carpet this Sunday.

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