No Texting Days 1-3: Getting used to it

I’ve completely underestimated the amount of information one can miss out on by ignoring 140 character messages. We’ve become a nation that is built to survive on speed and convenience – which is why there are at least nine fast food restaurants every two blocks, why we need our computers to be as fast as possible, why I may get a speeding ticket on my way home from work this afternoon, why we can access the internet from our cell phones and why text messaging was invented. We’re in an age where our attention spans have been shortened to Spud Webb proportions. Our minds are always in indeterminate flux and what we think about next is about as certain as which National League team will make an end-of-the-season push to make this year’s post season – we have no idea. This is essentially why text messaging has become so important to our daily lives.

On June 30, I wrote that I would attempt to go two solid weeks without sending one text message. What I didn’t say was that I would try not to read incoming text messages, which has been indefinitely harder than not sending any myself. The following is documentation from the first six days of the experiment.

Day 1
I woke up this morning with two text messages in my inbox. One was from Celia from late that night asking if I was asleep, which I clearly was since I did not see the message until the next morning. The other was from Amber responding to a text I sent her earlier in the day on the 20th, nothing I really needed to respond to (by the way, I get previews to every incoming text message, the first 35 characters. I read the previews, and sometimes that’s the whole message, the longer messages are the ones that are hard to ignore). Things aren’t too bad so far, however, I keep taking my phone out of my pocket checking it. What is the point? Even if I do have a text message, it’s not like I can respond or even call, considering people actually have jobs these days.

Day 2
Again I woke up to a text message, this time from Travis asking me what I was up to. In case none of you knew, I’m one of those early to bed, early to rise type of dudes since I have to ride my bike to and from campus, where I work for eight hours and work our for another two. If it’s past 10 p.m. on a weekday, you can count on me being asleep.

I’m working and going through my daily rounds of the sports websites. The LA Times website just gave me my first true test, I’m reading about Ron Artest verbally committing Los Angeles to play for my Lakers and Trevor Ariza will be going to Houston. It is taking a lot out of me restraining from texting every basketball fan in my phonebook. I want to brag to non-Lakers fans and get opinions from the few friends I had who were Lakers fans. To be honest, I just want to text. It’s only halfway through the day and it feels like it’s been five days. These are going to be the longest two weeks of my life. I can’t text during the NBA free agency period, I’m as broke as I’ve been in over a year and I work at what may be the most boring job in the world.

The week just got longer. As I sat there jotting down these notes, Celia sent me a message that said, “Keyshawn Johnson is terrible.” It is taking every ounce of will in my body to not respond to this text message. Celia may be the queen of random hilarious text messages that may or may not have been intended to make me laugh, but she never fails. It hurts to not be able to respond to this knowing that I can’t call either because of her internship. Just a simple “LOL” would feel so much better than a luke-warm shower after bike-riding home in 234 degree weather. I’m dying.

Day 3
I realize why I’m doing this. I finally don’t wake up to a text message, but I do get something that looks like it could be one of those forwarded chain messages. It’s about Lady Gaga, and I’m sure the punch line to the joke is going to have to do something with poking her face. Blah blah blah. I don’t really have a problem not reading this full message because chain messages are the scum of text messages. If text messaging were like school, texts about sports would be my major, pointless conversations with my female friends would be my sociology minor and chain messages would be like taking a fucking Geology class. I almost went four solid years without having one prototypical, stereotypical boring-ass college professor, and in a the class that I cared about the least, I finally get one. God he was awful, and he made sound affects for things that shouldn’t have sound affects. I’m realizing the affect text messaging is having on me – random tangents. My geology class has nothing to do with my self-imposed sanction on text messaging, I just have nothing else to do.

I get a text message from Dayshell. I met Dayshell in high school and she used to like me back then. I never really gave her much time, and I talk to her from time to time just to give her a hard time, which I really shouldn’t do because she’s pretty much in love with me (seriously). However, she’s pretty much the antithesis to “the girl I would date.” She doesn’t really like sports (even though she pretends she does when she talks to me), she listens to terrible music and she doesn’t read. She isn’t a stupid girl, but she definitely isn’t an intellectual, which you HAVE to be if you can’t make me laugh, which she most definitely can not – and I can say all of this, because she doesn’t read, so I don’t really have to worry about her reading this, and if she does, I don’t really like her like that any way, but I digress. I mentioned her because she is the epitome of why I hated text messaging to begin with. Since joining my school’s newspaper three years ago, I’ve become somewhat of a stickler for grammar, and have a hard time reading things without point out grammatical mistakes (even re-reading my shit, which I know there will be a lot of in this post, I’m terrible at editing my own work). Anyway, she loves starting off text conversations with “wut u doin” Not one word spelled correctly and no punctuation at the end of a fucking fragment sentence. I understand shorting some words to have shorter messages, but I don’t appreciate fragments and intentionally misspelled words. It’s not hard to put a “g” at the end of doing. It’s not hard to put an “r” in there to say what ARE you doing. It’s not hard to add a fucking question mark. I don’t have a bigger pet peeve than this. Dayshell just made Day 3 much easier than it would have been if she didn’t piss me off. Thank you Dayshell.

[Considering people don’t like to sit and read the same post for longer than 20 minutes, I’ll post days 4-6 tomorrow, and you’ll have days 7-9 on July 10th.]

-Stay Hideous
Word Count: 4065