I have this weird, very distinct memory from when I was about 11 of my oldest brother coming down the stairs of our childhood home and giving a waiting friend a brisk handshake.

I don’t know why I remember stuff like that. At the time that just seemed like one of those cool things guys do when they get older, like a rite of passage. “Hey, look everybody, we’re mature enough now to shake hands like men do!”

It kind of lost some of its luster when I saw that same friend a few years throwing up corn chips. But I digress …

For my generation I think it was the cool, indifferent handclasp that represented our “mature greeting.” Yep, one quick slap of the palms, and then an adjustment of our multiple Izod collars, and we were good to go, because we were AWESOME.

Nowadays I try to watch my teenage daughter’s rituals, and there are a variety of them. She’s a girl, of course, so they have a whole different set of rules — usually a smile, a squeal and a “distance hug.” But that’s not true for every friend or in every situation. The guys also have their own thing now: the fist bump.

But there is one part of the ritual that never varies — after every face-to-face greeting, they all reach for their cell phones to see who just texted them. Like an inhaler to the bespectacled geek in a John Hughes movie, teenagers are tethered to their cell phones in a way that is at once comical and sad. I have observed the bizarre spectacle of my daughter having a friend over to the house and them going for 30 minutes at a time without saying a word, they’re so busy on their cell phones and iPods and Facebook to bother even looking at each other.

Now, I’m not saying I’m complaining about the silence. But the rest of it is just strange.

This generation coming up is at once the most interconnected generation ever, and the least personally connected ever. They can call up riots and take down a government from their cell phones, like they did in Egypt, but struggle to formulate complete sentences when talking with adults. And all of those time-tested relationships that form over heartbreaks and successes and inside jokes summoned with just a look can’t be built by keypad, but they can be torn down with one careless punctuation in a text message.

Well, that’s overstating it … Who uses punctuation in a text?

Maybe having to learn relationships in a new way will be good for my daughter and her friends. Maybe they can figure out how to reverse generational trends in divorce and abuse by removing some of the peer pressure aspects of those. Maybe they can forge relationships with people they’ve never met in other places around the world and spread peace and freedom. Maybe.

But I would be worried about major treaties unraveling because someone laughed inappropriately. Lol.

Michael Alcorn is a music teacher and fitness instructor who lives in Arvada. He graduated from Alameda High School and University of Colorado-Boulder.