Monday, May 9, 2011

btw, idk abt tlwbd...


Okay, so it's been 45 years since my last post. What can I say? I keep wondering if I should just close this puppy down, but then I fear I'll never write anything at all - well, except maybe papers for school and essays for scholarship applications. Maybe I'll start posting those; at least there'd be something new to read. I'm sure everyone's dying to know why "I Did/Didn't Vote in the Last Election Because..." or "I Am a Conservative/Liberal Because..." Fascinating. Actually, the research paper on the Greene Brothers turned out nice. It even had pictures. I was never allowed to take up space with pictures in high school. But then I didn't really have the internet in high school either, so, you know...

Okay, so I won't post my papers; and I might even start posting something more often than every 9 months. Besides, I DO have four followers. I can't let my loyal fans down. Haha. I'm seriously laughing out loud to myself right now - or should I have said LOL? Blech. ...Which brings me to my reason for posting today.

This morning I was texting one of my friends about the carpool. I have to admit, she is one of the top 5 fun people to text because she always texts funny things. Not necessarily like "I can't stop laughing right now for hilarity in text," although she's had her moments there; but always stuff that at least makes me smile.

I think people roll their eyes when they see they're getting a text from me. That's probably because I'm not the most concise texter (or speaker, or blogger, for that matter). I've had more than one person tell me they always know they're getting a text from me when a text rings in and is immediately followed by another (and often another, and sometimes another more). Okay, so I have a lot to say; or I have a way of saying a little in a lot of words, I don't know which. But on top of my superfluous use of words, I have to say that I'm not really a fan of textese, or textspeak or SMS language or whatever they're calling it, which is certainly going to make my texts longer.

Sure, when I first started texting, I'd say 2 instead of to or too or two. And u instead of you, and r instead of our or are. And I admit it, I used the :) and ;) quite often. But over the past several months I've found myself shifting out of textspeak. And I'm even finding it difficult to use the :). I'll type "(insert smiley here)" instead. THAT could be the reason people get 5-page texts from me. I'm using up like 20 characters, where I could be using two.

I think it was LOL that tipped me overboard. One of our friends told us that his mom always thought that LOL meant Lots of Love. When the family's grandmother passed away, she sent out a text to the everyone that read, "Your grandmother has died. LOL."

I suspect that may have actually been a Readers Digest joke or something. But apparently, according to Wikipedia, LOL can mean Lots of Love too. See? Too confusing.

So I don't use it. I have lots of friends who do, which is fine, but I just can't bring myself to do it. My daughters know this, so they love to send me texts that say, "LOL, I'm going to Ellen's," or to read me people's facebook statuses that have things like, "Just walked into a wall. LOL!" Just not a fan.

But I think the thing that really sealed the deal for me was when I received a totally baffling initialism from my mom. We had been texting back and forth about some challenging thing my family was dealing with at the time, and at the end, my mom said some encouraging words of some sort and then, "And remember, TLWBD."

Um... What??? I admit, I'm not really up on the current terms, except for maybe BTW, JK, GTG and of course, LOL. But TLWBD? What in the world is that one? After trying a few fill-ins myself (To Labor With Bodily Discomfort? That Liars Will Be Damned? Tomorrow's Life Won't Be Death?) I texted her back and said, "Okay, so I know I'm out of it, but I have no idea what TLWBD means."

She texted back and said, "Oh, that's just textspeak for The Lords Will Be Done."

Of course. Silly me. I'm just saying, that wasn't listed in Wikipedia's list of Common Initialisms.