Going on a Quest

You heard me. It’s the best. I’ve been texting one of my dearest friends more or less the entire past two days because we don’t work very hard. But also…texting is way quicker than a lot of other time wasting practices! I can do it while I’m walking, eating lunch, pooping…

I don’t want to dump on phone calls too much with this, because sometimes that’s what you need. But I’m not the kind of person who calls up random friends every day to shoot the shit; I mostly call my mom on weekends or as needed if I’m doing something butch and need her to ask my father what kind of hardware I should go buy. For anyone else, it’s a whole formal affair where someone asks if we can call and then we have to choose a time where nobody’s supposed to be working diligently or pooping or sleeping. I had such a call a few weeks ago and it WAS nice, but it was such a Thing!

I can blast off a couple of texts about a weird dream I had or send a picture of a cat I just petted or ask a question and then drop it and go about my day. Then the lucky recipient of the cat photo gets back to me when they have time! And shows me their cat! And if we’re both fooling around on the clock, we can volley back and forth like we’re doing mouth talking, but there’s no requirement to keep coming up with stuff to say. It can fizzle out at dinner time and pick back up the next day when I see a new cat.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been tippy-tapping away to chat with strangers on the internet since I was too small to really be doing that, but I don’t have any problem with interpreting tone over text with people I know. And sometimes shit happens and somebody doesn’t know how to phrase something to get their point across, and that’s why God gave us the option to say “wtf?” or maybe “bro wut” and get on with it. The person’s voice comes through just fine though. Maybe I’m lucky because my friends are decent at expressing themselves.

I don’t know if this is “controversial” (in the way things that don’t matter at all sometimes are) since it’s an Apple vs Android thing, but I think the iMessage reaction options are really fun. The haha reaction gets heavy use, thumbs up in lieu of a dusty-ass “k” reply, thumbs down for comedy or sympathy, I just think it’s neat, honestly. STICKERS: every Apple user I text is at risk of getting a sticker I made that just says “loser” in a block. I also have “freak” and “GAYWAD” (I’m allowed but I’m not going to show you my card) ones. Plus a bunch of various cats in different expressive poses (curious, “do go on”, licking butthole). I am a menace.

When I was on Twitter, I was an all-lowercase poster. I still do that with some people, especially the people I’m texting the most, because most of those people have seen me without pants on so who cares. People I call “sir” or “ma’am” or otherwise want to seem respectable to get the proper capitalization. Everyone gets punctuation. Buddies get Expressive Artistic Liberties and YELLING and sometimes I remember I can make the text wiggle around all crazy and I’ll hit ‘em with that too.

Is there a point to this? No. Nobody is coming for the joys of texting. I’m just having a great time with it lately. I bet I’m going to engage in a little time theft chitchat with my friends tomorrow too.