Texting

Texting is the new modern way of communication between two persons. Text-messaging is efficient and fun and what everybody does now. You'll always catch kids glancing at their phones or sending messages, even during study hall. It is awesome and everybody loves it.

Except, you guessed it, me.

I used to text. The summer of 2010, I got involved with multiple roleplays on the Twilight fan site. In one of them, I met a person (yes, now I know the dangers of meeting people online), and we really hit it off. We exchanged phone numbers and emails, and we texted nearly all the time. This person claimed to be about three or so years older than me, and said they lived in Canada, as if psychically they knew that I loved that country to death even though I've never been there. We talked about the roleplay and school and life and random experiences and everything else. It was fun, and I became slowly addicted to this unhealthy relationship, and my mistake was telling my parents, who told me to end it. I was not happy to do this, and once I did, I kept trying to text them afterwards, as if they'd remember me and us and the roleplay and all that. Well, they held true to the "breakup" that I initiated.

I used to text. Between 2010 and 2011 (approximately), I used to text a guy I was friends with for about four or five years (the guy referred to as Malcolm in earlier blog posts, moviegoers and Walmart-shoppers, if you so recall). We would talk about anything from the zombie apocalypse to his being in the boy scouts to arranging bike rides (our parents always wanted to set these up for some reason) to talking about his girlfriends (yes, somehow I fell into that trap... and kept falling). I would text him mostly because I knew he always had his phone on and he would always respond to my messages, whereas other contacts of mine would not. I loved texting at that point. It was safe, because it was someone I had known face-to-face, and it was fun, because we had been friends for some time. At some point, I don't know exactly what caused it, I would text him and I wouldn't receive responses (this likely was after the talk about his girlfriends, or after he had sent a message to all of his contacts saying he'd changed his number). I went into a blackmail phase, where I would continually flood him with messages in hopes of one response. None. I began to back off, saying it wasn't worth it, he wasn't worth it, not if he was going to act like we'd never been friends. It might have been that he had tricked me, saying he had changed his number when he really hadn't. Maybe he hadn't gotten my messages at all, or had blocked me. In any case, nobody else I texted was as fun to talk to, so I eventually pulled away from texting anyone unless it was necessary.

So, I don't like texting. People feel, with the small keys and pressure to be fast in sending messages back and forth, that proper grammar and mechanics are unnecessary and therefore you end up with abbreviations that are incomprehensible and words without vowels and questions without inquiry marks at the end. Not only that, the people in my contacts are all people I know face-to-face, and most of them I talk to on a day-to-day basis. There is literally no need to text these people, at least in my eyes. Sometimes, over weekends or summer, I'll text a friend to set up a movie or something, but besides that, it's pointless.

There are only a few people I would actually like to text. But, as you can guess, these people no longer text me, and so I have discarded them as unworthy to even attain my attentions (except for right now). The one other person I'd like to text... I'd be afraid to. People might judge, this person might judge, this person might not even have a phone for all I know (which is unlikely). I hardly talk to this person at school; why would I find it necessary to text them?

So yeah, peeps. Moral of the story: if someone texts you, text them back for Pete's sake. Don't make them feel like a reject. If you don't want to talk to these people, just tell them so. If these people had just told me, I might have taken a different perspective.