When I asked my friend "S" how things were going with a new and romantically promising guy in her life, she gave a sly smile. She took a sip of beer and let the question hang.

"Well," she said finally. "I had to up my plan."

"Up your plan?" I said.

"My phone plan, my minutes," she said. "We're talking 75 texts last week alone."

It turns out that "S" (not her real initial) and her guy had yet to go out. No movie. No dinner. No ice cream. No mini-golf. No real 3-D contact.

"So are you dating or not?" I said, and she rolled her eyes.

And so it goes in our brave new world.

"If you have to up your plan," our friend Adam explained, "that means it's serious."

Adam's wise. Patient. He just turned 30 and writes obituaries for a living. This gives him perspective and the chance to use lines like "I'm buried in work" or "I make a killing on the graveyard shift."

I'm over a decade older than Adam and "S." And maybe this -- age and the sense of mortality that comes with it -- is what's making me crotchety where technology of the heart is concerned.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm on Facebook. I've tweeted. Animated kittens decked out in battle fatigues have wished me a purrr-fect day on MySpace. I check my three e-mail accounts at least 50 times a day.

Thanks to the Internet, I know the following: A kindergarten friend's stripper name is Tawny Glitter. Her pirate name is Captain Smelly Beard. One of my students has a blackberry-schnapps hangover. Another is a fan of Post-It notes. And a friend from college just took her pug to the vet to have its anal glands squeezed.

And knowing all this enriches my life how, exactly?

Recently, when NBA star Richard Jefferson dumped his fiancee by e-mail days before their wedding, a lot of people seemed outraged. How insensitive, they said. How cowardly. But one AOL reader named Timwicinski1 put it this way: "Could've been worse. Could've been via Twitter."

The jilted bride's best friend blogged about the break-up: "She's going through some way-serious grief right now."

"Sometimes you might write an e-mail to get your thoughts down right," Mr. Jefferson told The New York Post, which headlined the story "An E-Mail Slam Dump: Ex-Net Uses 'Net to Ditch Bride."

So there. Technology allows us to be orderly. It allows us control over emotions. It provides distance with the illusion of closeness. It's the illusion of meaning without meaning -- I'm talking to you, Captain Smelly Beard. It's the illusion of human relationships without the messiness of real human contact. It is, maybe, the spiritual equivalent of The Bubble Boy -- a perfectly contained and sanitized way to exist in a world that's wild and sloppy, terrifying and wonderful.

Some days, hours go by and I realize I've done nothing but stare into a computer screen. Sure, I'll get up when my son and daughter need to eat or when I need more coffee, but still. It used to be people worried about sleeping their lives away. "Get up," my father said. "Sleep when you're dead. Live your life so the obit writers will have something to write about."

These days, I worry how much of my life I've whittled away in cyberspace, how much I've missed. I'd like to say I'd stop, that I'd shut the computer off, that I'll be a better person, more present, engaged, but it's complicated.

"I'm quitting the Facebook time-suck. Enough. Goodbye," one friend writes. In a week, he's back. "I missed you all," he writes.

When friends come over for dinner, the night doesn't go by without text messages coming in. The conversation lulls, thumbs fly, everybody laughs at private jokes on their own tiny personalized screens.

Together at the same dinner table. Separate as strangers on a subway.

"Hey," I said to my brother last week when he kept texting away. I stuck my head between him and his Blackberry. I poked and waved.

"What?" he said. "Does this bother you?"

"I just want to talk," I said.

"We are talking," he said. The Blackberry buzzed again. Incoming message.

Incoming. Like a bomb.

The late journalist Studs Terkel once put it this way: "More and more we are into communications, and less and less into communication."

Studs Terkel, the author of classics like "Working," loved human contact. He loved the sound of the human voice. He listed his home phone number in the Chicago phone book. He loved to ride the bus and talk to strangers. He loved to listen to their stories and figure out something true about what it meant to be alive.

My favorite Terkel story is this one: Studs is being mugged in front of his home. He's rolling around with the mugger on the ground. Studs is trying to pull his wallet out to give to the guy, but Studs can't help it. He wants to talk.

"How much do you usually make on one of these jobs?" he asks the mugger. "How many of these do you do a night?"

What I want to tell my friend S -- forget about your plan. Forget plans. Take a chance. Call the guy up. Better yet, show up in person with two tickets to a baseball game. Sure, this is Pittsburgh. The Pirates might lose. They often do. You might lose, too, but that's OK. Put the phone down. Live.