Top Ten Odd and Curious Thoughts (about Texting)

March 17, 2014 By

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(1) I love to text.  My thumbs fly so fast you would not believe.  There’s nothing more gratifying than the three little dots that says “they’re writing something at this very moment! In a few short moments, unless they get a phone call, have to take something hot off the stove, have an urge to do something different, or feel like totally ignoring me, I’ll know what they are thinking!” Yay!

(2) Come to think of it, phone calls are actually more efficient. As a bonus you get to hear awkward pauses, which is a delightful hobby. Why did we start texting, anyway?

(3) Oh yes, I remember.  Because you don’t have to speak to anyone.  And you sound more intelligent when you write rather than dumbly asking your man how his day was.  It was fine? Super.  You ate grilled chicken for dinner? Awesome. And your day? Oh I already asked that.

(4) Conversely, you can’t save them like love letters.  Printed screen shots just aren’t the same. It’s perhaps a bit weird and creepy to print out volumes of screen shot text messages. I imagine strange giggling and Saturday nights spent scrapbooking.

(5) My mom started to text. Which means at 10 am when I’m sitting in a meeting I get reminded to buy a crock pot and that next summer we’re getting together for July 4 and random thoughts like “I watched five minutes of Honey Boo Boo and who watches this stuff because this show is awful and your father is cooking eggs” and your boss keeps glaring at you for your buzzing phone.  Little does he know its just mom, stream-of-conscious asking if you turned off your coffee maker.

(6) The standard test for if a friend will make it past the introductory text phase is whether they can handle humor via text or whether all snarky throw downs will end with an LOL and a smiley face for the loss.  That being said there are times that I’m just tired and a good solid LOL is all I can muster.  It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

(7) I am the worst at not being able to get in touch with a coworker so I just naturally assume that I can text them like “hey buddy, so sorry to bug you but can you just stop everything you’re doing and pay attention to me because I have this work issue that’s super important (to me only) and I need you to be interrupted during your chipotle burrito to explain this complex financial arrangement to me real quick-like? THANKS!!” or the like.

(8) I’ve found that including the standard smiley-faced emoticon conveys a decent amount of normalcy or perhaps diffuses a humorous statement. Yet more intricate pictures seem to scream “I’m a nerd and found out there’s a Spanish dancer twirly-skirt lady in my picture file so I’ll choose to use it” and you don’t want to be that guy

(9) I love it when someone texts an obvious mistake like “I’ll be there at eight because I’m running a little lame” and then later you get the follow-up text that says “late” like you couldn’t possibly figure out what they meant by using standard context and you would just naturally just assume they were talking smack about themselves and they needed to clear up the rumors

(10)               Most of my best friends answer about half of my texts because they have a life and could possibly fail to care for their children or not have time to eat or shave their legs if they answered them all but then the next day I’ll get a picture of Chunk, Missouri with a statement like “who the heck names a town Chunk” and then all is forgiven for not commenting on my cute kid pictures because I am a lover of random texts.

There are times, however, that I miss the days of talking for hours.  I yearn for the flavor and tenor of a human voice.  I miss the nervous talking over each other and twirling the cord in your hand and the amount of openness it takes to talk without the shield and power of words and time to prepare them.  And most importantly, you have to form a coherent verbal response instead of just saying HAHA! LOL! Rolling on the floor laughing! Seriously? I’ve never seen anyone roll on the floor unless it part of a fire drill, and they are usually cursing under their breath.

So as many reasons as there are to love texting – for it’s convenience and it’s ability to hide behind words – it’s good to pick up the phone sometimes, just to go through the exercise of speaking to another human being.  To find out that we are human, and raw, and awkward.  To lift your head up and look around you. Maybe at the core, we are all just scared we’ll look stupid and hide behind machines to be safe.

Be different. Brave.  Put your thumbs down.  Talk to one other.

Filed Under: Embarrassing Moments, Humor Tagged With: , , , , ,

Letting Go

September 20, 2012 By

my daughter, now six

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Being a writer is hard.  I love the feeling late at night when I finish an essay, like I crossed a finish line or finally caught a breath of mountain air.  I like getting positive feedback as a balm to my itchy insecurities.  And when I sent my novel – my baby child that stole nights and weekends and so many rivers of tears– off to my editor, I was grateful when she said it’s good.  It’s actually really good.  And yet agents email me saying “it’s not you, it’s us” and “we are so sorry for this rather impersonal rejection.”  It’s a literary black hole, and you have to hold onto the railing to keep from being swept under.

I wish I could roll up my sleeves and go have a meeting with someone.  I wish I could just go make something happen. I’d curl my hair and put on my heels and pound my fist on a desk.  Progress will be made.  Things will crawl off dead center because I know how to make people jump.  I got a job once by making an appointment with the CEO.  Somehow a job was created.  A job I dreamed up in my head and convinced them they needed.

And yet here I sit alone, eating pistachios and drinking coffee and reading other people’s words.  I try and let writers inspire me, and be thankful for their successes, and try and feed on the natural creativity that follows.  I tell myself that God is listening and my blog followers are listening and these things matter.  And yet my mind wanders off to bad places – dark caves where I’m nothing and my life is insignificant and my words are just cheap imitations.

I think about that time six years ago, when I lay in a hospital bed staring at the ceiling tile.  After a prolonged labor and emergency c-section she was finally given to me, this beautiful gift from God that I didn’t deserve.  She was so white and angelic and I wouldn’t let her go.  But days after arriving home with my first-born they came to take me away, on some damn stretcher that held heart victims and dead people.  There were doctors and surgeons and tests.  There were re-incisions and pains and organs being shut down.  I just kept looking at that ceiling tile, thinking God just wouldn’t do this to me and he couldn’t possibly let me die.  Not now.  Not like this.  I’ve worked so hard, remember, Lord?  I make things happen. Are you listening up there?

I asked for the breast pump, my body filled with drugs and steroids and horrible chemicals of all types, and forced that milk out through excruciating tears as each surge of the pump caused my scarred and infected abdomen to seize.  But I was a fighter, and this wouldn’t break me.

See, God?  This is what you’d be saving. 

One night, a nurse came in.  She looked right through me. You need to let go, she said.  You need to let God to take over. I was angry.  I was pissed off at her accusations.  Who the hell are you, all up in my business about faith?  Have you not seen how hard I’ve worked?  Have you not seen my tears and heard my prayers? I am dying here, woman, with the fever and the infection and the chills.  Can’t you see that I’m trying?  Can’t you see I’ve not seen my baby’s face for weeks and this just isn’t working like I planned and I’m so damn sick of this place?  Can’t you see that I have this tube in my throat and my husband isn’t eating and it just never ceases?  Can’t you see that I don’t want to see a picture of her, my perfect three-week-old daughter, because it fills me with rage and sadness? Isn’t this enough?

You have to let it go.

I think about that night when I get this way.  When I think I’m in charge.  When I keep pounding away on the keyboard like the surging breast pump.  When the devil whispers in my ear that my words don’t matter and a book deal is the brass ring and all this is just a big vat of wasted time.

Stand back, Devil. 

It all matters.  My words matter.  My life matters.  Whether it’s typing or living or birthing or dying, we all just have to let go.  We aren’t the one making things happen. God makes things happen. We are just the instruments of his peace.

Filed Under: Inspirational, Motherhood, My life, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

ribbons

March 20, 2012 By

I have articles from the Department of Justice sitting all around my ankles, sprayed out like a fan in neat little piles.  I haven’t strayed far from the computer for hours and a babysitter is attending to my daughter.  A half-started and half-witted attempt to summarize the laws of Medicare fraud lies unattended on the screen in front of me as deadlines await.  Deadlines that amount to paychecks, that amount to more gardening supplies and summer sundresses and art camps.  I will finish it on time.  I will somehow find the energy.  God let me finish.

It’s not that words are hard to come by.  I live in words. I both admire and abhor them.  I want to stomp on them like ripe grapes and feel the juice squirting out between my toes. The problem with words is that I simply can’t escape them.  I am drawn to words that make me laugh or cry or feel something different.  Legal writing doesn’t invoke that same emotion, which is why I drift into my daydreams.   Dreams of stories and beauty and adjective-filled rooms filled with light.

When I lie in bed at night, with dishpan hands and a tired back, my fingers tap away at some imaginary keyboard in the sky.  I can hear the repetitive sound of my hands striking the letters like summer storms on a metal roof.  Rapping and pelting and beating down while I’m trying to sleep or pray or just lie there in peace.  I try to shake them from my head, but like the ringing in one’s ears, it’s a fool’s game.

So I keep driving to the grocery store, or to the bank drive-through. I drop off my husband’s dry cleaning and help my daughter cut out caterpillars out of yellow construction paper. But sentences keep forming like ribbons out of my brain, some constant output I can’t seem to shut off.   My daily life is so busy I don’t often do  anything with them.  They are just mental litter, thrown away like discarded trash. There are times I just want words to leave me be.  To allow me to sit silently without thinking, or hearing that incessant tapping of the keys, or the phrasing of sentences.  I want to scream at them to shut up already.  Sometimes, I just want to sit and not think of all those stupid, stupid words.

But we all have our gifts, whether we are paid for them or not.  We all carry with us some unyielding urge to create, albeit in different forms.  I firmly believe that God chose to give each of us the gifts that we were meant to have, and there’s little way around it.  According to Exodus, the Lord told Moses that he chose Bezalel, son of Uri, to oversee the task of building the tabernacle. “I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts — to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of craftsmanship.”  Exodus 31:3.  Paul explained in 1 Corinthians 12 that all the gifts we have been given “are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he gives them to each one just as he determines.”

I may, or may not, ever get paid for my words.  The novel that took me years to finish, with nights of sobbing and mornings of great exaltations, might never be read by the New York Times or by a single woman in the suburbs of Chicago.  The words that plague my sleep and dominate my fingers might be small to most.  But they are ultimately from God.  They need to be used and cultivated so that when they spring forth from my head, they are as tulips rather than dandelions.

I thank God for words, even though sometimes they feel like a burden.  But when the burden is for a higher good, and the purpose so great, can one really complain?

Lord, please let my words and the aching of my heart be acceptable to you, in your sight, and in your most perfect glory.  Thank you for these ribbons that flow from my thoughts.  Help me piece and string them all together as jewelry fit for a king.   

Filed Under: Religion, Writing Tagged With: , , ,