Break-up Texts

Back in the day, when I graduated from college, texting hadn’t yet caught on in the States. But it had in Italy, which was my first destination after commencement.  There, I was introduced to the rather romantic, Italian art of texting, though a text was more frequently referred to as an SMS – pronounced along the lines of essemmesse. The Italians send lovely little love texts – full of big kisses (bacioni), quotes from romantic poets long dead, and cheesy lines like this one:

A volte mi chiedo dove abitino gli angeli, in aria, in cielo, o in terra? Non lo so, so solo che un angelo tiene adesso il proprio cellulare in mano.

And in English: Sometimes I wonder whether angels live in the air, the sky, or on land. That I don’t know: I only know that an angel currently has her cell phone in her hand.

I got that one from a guy I’d hung out with twice. I hadn’t been planning on a third time seeing as the chemistry just wasn’t there, but then I got this text…

While in Italy, I read an article in the Florence Metro paper that disparaged Britney for divorcing her beau by text but also pointed out that texting seemed to be encouraging Italian males in their early teens to be more affectionate and sweet, as it enabled them to send ‘thinking of you’ messages throughout the day and goodnight kisses at bedtime – sans too much effort or the teasing of their friends.

UK texts weren’t nearly as noteworthy, but for the fact that English boys (not huge verbal communicators to begin with) seem to think the advent of texting is indisputable proof that man was never intended to actually speak on the phone.

My faves from India were from a random guy I met in Calcutta, who had just applied for a passport so he could travel to America. We happened to share a birthday, and that sealed it – we were to be friends for life:

1+1 = 2 My eyes looking for U. 2+3 = 5 Sense missing for U. 5+2 = 7 Days thinking of U. 7+5 = 12 Month dreaming about U. 99 + 1 = 100 Years I need a sweet friend like you.

If lovers are like MOON then friends are like STARS and have you noticed that the sky can look beautiful with out MOON but not without *STAR*

To be fair, all of the above is recycled material. I’ve thought about it before, written about some of it before, etc. But what dusted the cobwebs off the topic of texting was a gem that a friend recently received.

Set the scene: Boy and girl date. Boy doesn’t want to date girl anymore. Boy too much of a pussy to break up with girl, so he acts like a jerk – distant, unemotional, irresponsive – until she breaks up with him. Some time passes, and boy moves to girl’s neighborhood (not on purpose, it’s a cool neighborhood, lots of people are moving there). Boy has a neighborhood-related question, and seeing as girl’s lived there for ages, perhaps she can help him out.

Boy texts girl: Hey would you be able to do me a favor?

Girl texts back: Really Dave, this is pushing it. Are you hurt? injured? If you need a kidney it’s out of the question. In short: favor unlikely.

1 day later…

Girl texts boy again: By the way, what was it?

People used to write, keep and cherish letters. We have a record of our emails, but when you’re 75, do you really envision yourself sifting online through the many thousand to re-read the particularly touching ones? I suppose the simple answer would be to print out the good stuff now to save you the trouble later, but I don’t have a printer, so that plan’s out the window. The point is – for the most part, we don’t have a record of our texts. I scribbled down a few from Italy on bits of paper and quickly found that bits of paper have a habit of going missing…

But fear not, anthropologists of the future, there are now a slew of websites that encourage users to aggregate their electronic comms by theme – I’ve mentioned textsfromlastnight before, but postcardsfromyomomma is also getting heaps of attention in the media. So I’m thinking it’s high time we get a site up and running for funny “break-up and its aftermath” texts. We may, lest we get too down, want to include the funny “falling in love” ones as well, for example: you are crazy beautiful you make me drool

Other amusing, indicative of our times, user-generated-content sites:

maybeyoushouldntbuythat.com

thisiswhyyourefat.com

stuffwhitepeoplelike.com (oldie but goodie)

And, finally, on a completely unrelated note, I like this:

Office Gossip

The office: A decidedly amusing place to pick up out-of-context conversation snippets, especially as you typically don’t overhear them alone, so the snippets instigate conversations, from which others can proceed to pick up out-of-context conversation snippets, etc.

At one of my offices (job/job+freelance), the iconic water cooler is tucked into the very back of a sliver of a skinny kitchen area, which is also home to microwave, mega fridge, tea bags galore and two typically empty (by the time I get there) drip coffee machines. So as you can imagine it can sometimes be a bit of a ‘sorry,’ ‘excuse me,’ ‘if you’d just close the fridge door a touch,’ ‘whoops,’ ‘don’t spill the coffee’ ordeal getting to the water. Most of the times though, I come careering round the corner just as someone’s marching out, and it’s the best I can do to avoid a head-on collision. But pack to picking up snippets.

The other day, I overheard (in the kitchen area, as per above scenario) the following: “…Bonobos, they’re the monkeys who like to have sex…” and then I was sitting back at my desk thinking about Bonobos. April, my anthro major sophomore year suite mate, had clued me in to that topic years ago. Out of all animals, Bonobos most closely resemble humans because they too seem to copulate just for the pleasure of it. If my memory serves me correctly – unless some new military-position-favoring species has evolved in the interim six years – Bonobos are also the only other animals who do it face to face.

Why, then, is the web-only outlet for the supposedly perfect male pants called bonobos.com? The NY Times UrbanEye newsletter (which of course hits my inbox while I am at work contemplating monkey mating trends) informs me that Bonobos is where men in the know go for “perfectly tight-but-not-too-tight pants for men” where the “styles fit more like jeans, walking ‘a careful line between comfortable and sexy.’” I wonder if the guys buying Bonobos’ ‘awesome fitting trousers’ know about the origin of the brand’s name?

My mind a-wandering, I overhear a colleague a few desks down to my left and across the way talking about how much he likes squash. To my right, Andy nods and says to me, “yeah, I really like squash too.”

“The vegetable or the English drink?” I inquire

“What English drink?”

“You know – like Ribena – that syruppy stuff they put in water in England to flavor it?” Andy’s shaking his head. “Whenever you go to someone’s house in England, they always offer you squash or tea. It’s like the other national beverage that no one’s ever heard of.”

Andy’s face lights up in recognition, “Ah, tea, well that much I know. In Ireland as well, it’s always tea tea tea. And Star Trek. I lived in Tipperary for two months.”

“Tipperary? There’s a song about Tipperary. How does it go?”

“I don’t know. There is a famous song though, but yeah they drink a lot of tea there. I liked it, but not the Star Trek as much. They’re obsessed. It’s a really small place. Every morning at 7am you get woken up by the sheep being taken out to pasture along the main road – there’s only one – and then at 5pm, they all get shuffled back. By that time everyone’s back in for more tea and biscuits.”

Which made me think of the sheep herding protagonist in The Alchemist and the sheep dwellers in Absurdistan, both good reads if you’re in the market for a book, the former a feel-good classic, the latter wholly unorthodox and guaranteed to offend if you’re PC-inclined. I come full circle to Bonobos though, because the perfect-pant-touting site is currently featuring the Cordistans – “corduroy trousers from the mythical land of Cordistan.” Whoever came up with that brilliant marketing ploy is obviously as taken with the former Soviet Republics as is Misha Vainberg, the 325-pound Russian oligarch and narrator of Absurdistan. It seems fair to say that Cordistans may actually hail from Absurdistan – though they were probably a lot cheaper to make than the $130 they sell for.

But it was more the tea than the sheep that Andy was interested in, so we tried to figure out why the US is a nation of coffee fanatics and the UK a nation of tea drinkers, but I’ll bore you with that hypothesis another time. More important is to mention the book Coffee, Tea or Me? which I read when I was thinking of ditching college for stewardess school. The title speaks for itself. These days, though, it’s all about the savvy flyer, not the sexy one, so I suppose it’s not so bad my dreams of hostessing in the skies never materialized.

You’re probably wondering how I get any work done with all this clutter in my head, but Savvy Flyer brought me right back down to earth, snug in my armchair travel assignment. Bon Voyage!

You’re Canadian, right?

Recently, a lot of people have been suggesting I may be from Canada. Also that I am part of the gaming community. And that I’ve been living in Greenpoint long enough to give people advice about purchasing real estate in the area.

All false, but it’s our nature to assume isn’t it? We make educated guesses about everything from where someone is from to how that affects their interaction with the world at large because it’s just how we are. We gather information, try to make sense of it in (i.e. squeeze it into) the context of our world view and make connections (real or imaginary) between what we have before us and what we have previously learned or encountered.

I’m back in New York for a bit now but I’ve lived around the world. As such, I tend to confound people’s attempts to categorize me because I’m not really any one thing. I lived in London for just over two years (6 months of which were spent in San Francisco and India) before moving to Greenpoint, and I picked up a bit of English cadence. Not wholly on purpose, but when you spend 16 hours a day working with Brits, it’s almost unavoidable. Even while working in India I grew accustomed to tacking ‘na?’ or ‘yaar?’ to the end of my sentences (much like the Canadian ‘hey?’). Those nuances got the boot as soon as I was back in the UK because really, it’s about making oneself understood. The vaguely anglicized accent (most noticeable in the way I pronounce my ‘o’s especially in the words ‘job’ and ‘offer’ although heavens knows I haven’t been using them in conjunction of late) is slightly more ingrained than my verbal attempts at blending into India were. With time, it too will fade.

But for now, I’m from Canada.

The gaming association is from my overabundant use of the word uber, which I’m told is big with gamers. Not quite sure where I picked it up…perhaps at Google?

I don’t know why people assume I’m a Greenpoint veteran. Probably because I live with one. Or perhaps because I’m such a fan. Give me an inch, and I’ll go on ad nauseum about Greenpoint’s many claims to idyllic perfection.

Some of it comes down to unintentionally talking a big talk. There’s so much information swirling around out there, that if you’ve just read an interesting article on x and spout its contents off to a friend, who happens to know nothing about the subject, you’re automatically deemed expert. It’s good to be an expert, but it’s even better to know a lot of experts, so people don’t mind giving out the label rather generously. “Oh great, that’s one more expert I know; she’ll really come in handy when I’m (looking to buy in Greenpoint, for example).”

I don’t intentionally mislead people. I just like to share the sliver of information I’ve come across and hope others will do the same. Informative, interesting and/or entertaining. Share your intel, people. I’m convinced it’s the secret to being a good conversationalist (and citizen), Canadian or otherwise.

In Fact

The current issue of The New Yorker houses a rather self-reflective article on fact-checking entitled “Checkpoints: Fact-checkers do it one tick at a time.” A must read for folks who balk at a misreported fact (no matter how trivial) and find that typos teeter a fine line between careless and offensive.

I happen to be doing a lot of fact-checking at the moment. And working for an online publisher has its perks – errors, spelling or otherwise, can be fixed in a flash. The error and all record of it disappears, and poof you can pretend it never even happened. What a godsend for all those perfect people out there who ‘never’ err.

From my personal experience with fact verification and double-checking, I’m beginning to wonder whether one can ever really be sure. It’s important that your verification come from a reputable source, naturally, and even better, from the corroboration of numerous reputable sources. The trouble is, it is very possible for many to believe the wrong thing (think mob mentality instead of the wisdom of crowds), and even reputable sources can disappoint. As per the aforementioned article: “An error is everlasting…once an error finds its way into print it ‘will live on and on in libraries carefully catalogued, scrupulously indexed…silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors, so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata.'” It’s all very post-modern, really. What is real? Does reality exist?

And how many people actually care? The explosion of the internet, along with the blogosphere, has made information more accessible, sure, but it’s also made a lot of misinformation parading as information more accessible as well. When people read something unbelievable, they say, “Wow, I can’t believe that actually happened” not “Is this really true?” We place a hefty amount of trust in the media (though we are getting better at identifying political slant), and this especially holds true for print media. My father – who worked for Reuters for many years – bristles at the apparent fact that newspapers will publish anything these days without a thorough fact-check. And it’s true – there have been scandals. And if it’s happening at big outfits like the New York Times, you know it’s got to be rife everywhere else as well. Judging from the “Checkpoints” article, though, you’re still safe with The New Yorker.

Media aside, though, there’s always been a bit of a grey area between lie and exaggeration. Any seasoned cocktail party storyteller will tell you that embellishment is a key tool of the trade. Is fact all that important to us when it comes to an entertaining tale? When a film is ‘based on a true story,’ do we query to what extent? Do we want to know which parts are true and which are based? When it comes to comforting or advising, it seems that the option of honesty is always, unavoidably preceded by the modifier brutal.

Stable people seem to intuit the difference between an embellishment that’s merely that (and can be enjoyed or appreciated as such) and one that’s a lie. One too many outrageous stories (especially of those that put the speaker in the rosy spotlight and paints all other players as crazy/stupid/ignorant/insensitive) and your listeners are going to glaze over, drift to more credible, if somewhat less amusing, storytellers.

Not long ago, at a rather informal sorority almuni brunch (yes shock horror I was in a sorority at college), someone was recounting the honeymoon tale of an absent sorority sister and recent divorcee (I’ll call her Samantha). “Sam told me that on their honeymoon, her husband turned around and said, I think if I met you today, I would never marry you.” The requisite chorus of shocked gasps, omigods and sympathizing nods ensued, but instead of joining in, I ventured, “Is anyone here very friendly with Samantha?” A round of head-shakes. “So,” I continued, “do any of us actually believe that Samantha’s ex said that on their honeymoon?” A brief skip of silence made me wonder if the all-you-can-drink bloody marys had gotten the better of me. Had I been totally inappropriate? No, as it turns out. No one at my end of the table had any more faith in Samantha’s far-fetched stories than I did.

Most people are not sticklers for facts, don’t fine-tooth-comb or do it one tick at a time (like our friends at The New Yorker). In fact, it’s uber pomo (read: cool and cutting edge) to blur the line between fact and fiction, but there is a limit and a context to people’s willingness to play along. And whether you’re reporting inaccuracies intentionally or not, it’s pretty devastating to be branded as that person (or publication) who (that) can’t seem to get it together to know when it’s important to stick to (or triple-check) the facts.

Sexperimenting

Just a quickie about neologisms. I wrote a little while ago about fupas and flirtationships; ever since I’ve been on the lookout for words I’ve never seen before, and they are just popping up everywhere.

A friend recently sent me in the direction of a NY Times piece on Rev. Ed Young who encouraged his congregation of 20,000 in Grapevine, Texas to engage in a ‘sexperiment’ (seven days of sex) as a way of getting closer to god. (Don’t worry, he’s still an advocate of abstinence – for the premarital, he recommended chocolate cake as an alternative.) I baked brownies a week ago and have been eating at least one a day – thus far no indication that it’s bridging the gap between me and the almighty. Perhaps brownies don’t suffice as an alternative to chocolate cake?

Grey’s Anatomy coined ‘oncebian’ and ‘twicebian’…for the infrequent lesbian.

A Virgin Atlantic ad spoke of ‘airphoria.’ I think this can be used no matter the carrier. It’s pretty hard to have a good flight experience, especially if you’re relegated to economy (which most of us are), so it seems reasonable to describe a flight that doesn’t make you want to slit your wrists as airphoric. Or should we save the term for those exercising membership in the mile high club?

Chrismukkah. A convenient one for those whose fate is an interfaith relationship (or just another marketing gimmick), but it’s just made the national circuit given yet another White House gaffe. Invites to a White House Chanukkah reception this year bore an image of a Clydesdale-drawn Christmas tree en route to the White House’s front door, already adorned with a Christmas wreath. Nice to know someone’s looking after the details.

I like that language is so malleable. As long as you know your audience and your letters (and a little latin), you can be an inventor of words. For now though, I think I’ll stick to documenting (mockumenting) – a resident neologistorian.

Looking for a serious flirtationship

About a month ago I read an article (well, more like a list) in the AARP Bulletin (not my usual – it was sitting suggestively on my folks’ kitchen table as I looked for some reading to go with my cereal) cluing parents in on the meanings of some of the contemporary terms their teens are touting. Amongst them were some basics – frenemy, ridonkulous, bling, crackberry – some brit imports – chav, snog – and some I’d never heard of – jump the shark, wikidemia, flirtationship*.

I suppose it’s a sign of my age (ripe old 26) and perhaps my time spent overseas that I’m not hip to all this jargon (brit imports excluded), but I also wonder how much I can rely upon writer Ms. Betsy Towner’s expertise? A Google search for teen slang/lingo pulls up a slew of these linguistic compilations, a quick perusal of which finds little to no overlap!

But if it is just my ignorance at play, I suppose I have other words to worry about. I’ve been doing a lot of proofing/fact-checking of other writers’ work of late and today came across what I initially thought was a typo: “a tony women’s shop.” Does the writer mean tiny? No, a quick online search proves the establishment in question quite large. Sanity check – do either of my podmates recognise the adjective in context? Nope. Some more sleuthing and I have my answer. Dating back to 1877, tony means stylish, upscale, marked by an aristocratic or high-toned manner or style. It jars me to think I’ve never come across the word before – all the period novels, the Jane Austen, the Charles Dickens I’ve read! (Perhaps it’s time to instate a quid pro quo: when in with bling, out with tony?) I wonder how many more times I’m going to experience this in my life. Will there be words I’ve never read/heard when I’m 64? It happened with ‘well-appointed’ a few months ago – I guess I don’t read enough hotel reviews – and my colleague from Miami drew a blank for ‘schooner.’

I may not be able to get a firm grip on all the oldies (or the n00bs, i.e. newcomers) but neologisms, acronyms and foreign imports are tres fun. A few that make me smile:

dink: double income no kids (perhaps my current aspiration)

chocka (from oz): full

starchitect: not sure what this one means but sometimes the beauty’s in the lack of clarity. designer of planetariums? celebrity architect? architect to the stars?

playing defense: the boy’s trying to get lucky and you’re fending him off (usu. not because you don’t want to but because he’s going to think you’re easy if you do).

fupa: fat upper pubic (pussy) area – you know someone’s really obese when…

What are your faves?

*jump the shark: to have peaked and now be on a downward slide | wikidemia: a term paper that was entirely researched on Wikipedia | flirtationship: a prolonged flirtation with an acquaintance, not involving physical contact.