“WHY WOULD YOU USE A PERIOD, ARE YOU MAD AT ME!?”Â
“now why why did you end with a smiley face, did i do something–”
These are some of the ways my average conversations over text look with my friends. There is this rampant, constant microanalysis of what all our statements might mean, always scrounging to find hidden meanings in the other person’s text(s). I barely ever am enthusiastic about texting anymore (minus the feature where you can turn your friends into stickers). I think much of this has to do with the fact that I am not a huge fan of the guessing game that ensues when my peers use punctuation to denote emotion rather than grammar. Waking up to see my WhatsApp notification bar with 94 unread texts every morning just gives me the jeebies. No wonder I prefer calls way more than texting.
Misunderstandings over text have been the number one cause for the graveyard of my fallen friendships. I mean, it just feels like a constant performance. To pick the right emoji, to think before double-texting, to not leave anyone on seen, spiralling when you see someone online but unresponsive to your texts. The fast-paced service on a platter just doesn’t have the same charm as seeing someone scrunch up their face in real-time when you crack a cringe joke or hearing the snorty laughter when there’s something funny they come across. Now you only tell me where’s the fun in all of that being reduced to a plain boring “lmao” (When I know you are, in no way laughing your ass off).
It is so much of somebody’s personality just diluted into a few characters, shoehorned into efficiency by keeping the texts short. It sometimes feels like I am meant to text “how are you doing on this fine evening, my sweet angel, I really badly wanna hang out with you and grab some ice cream?” but forced to text “wassup g?” This is perhaps the reason why I have always been big on voice notes, direct calls, video notes, and, god forbid, if those aren’t possible, then spamming stickers and emojis. Once again, fair warning: if you become friends with me, you will be turned into a sticker at the earliest. :)
Given the kind of boisterous person I very evidently am, I think that my preference for these in a time when everybody is moving on to abandoning the aforementioned to avoid looking “cringe” or not “in-with-the-times” comes as a response borne out of frustration for the sheer opacity of not being able to really see through what a person means when texting.
This is why I am perhaps averse to having lengthy conversations on text, doesn’t matter whether they are hearty or serious. I miss the time when people were not averse to being silly and absolutely obsessed with sharing .jpegs of “Be like Bro” memes and stupid cat GIFs. Also, man, now you have gotta clean up all the records of tea spills because you never know that all your honest lore could be swirling around in other group chats.
Now, before all the “unc” comments start flooding my way, I don’t inherently think that texting is bad. It leaves so much room for those who perhaps are conscious about sharing voice notes/videos of themselves. Also, it saves one’s bandwidth (both emotional and network-based, hehe) and provides a good enough buffer to ground themselves and respond accordingly. My bone to pick here is solely with the flipside of this extremely anxiety-inducing party, where instead of mixers, all you are left with are mixed signals. I am tired of punctuation meaning one thing, while emojis mean the other. I cannot keep up with the lifeless loops of characters strewn together to communicate. I mean, people used to tie letters on pigeons in the 20th century, and you’re telling me that you are afraid to double text!? Maybe that is why I don’t wanna text, g.