Scanner Emily and Scanner alum Sarah Hepola met this weekend for the first time. Exciting, right? While we have no photographic evidence to back this up, Scanner Emily was super excited and we drank a lot and everybody had a good time. Even more exciting? Getting a text message booty call of sorts from Salon Sarah at the ass crack of dawn on Sunday morning.
Okay, okay it wasn't a real booty call. Nor was it directed at us exclusively, but Salon Sarah did write an article about text message booty calls that landed in our inbox at a very early hour, and we'd like to think that we're at least worthy of one of our own.
Now apparently Sarah is not much of a texter, and we can forgive her for that, especially because she hates abbreviations as much as we do:
Part of the problem is that I'm an annoying grammar snoot who refuses to abbreviate. I find it offensive to collapse the English language into emoticons and acronyms. I think text messaging has indulged everyone's worst impulses to ignore spelling and disregard punctuation. I'm a former English teacher; I've had throwdowns about the serial comma, and I used to 86 a guy if he misspelled "a lot." What am I supposed to do with "l8er" and "sez"?
SS we totes feel u alot.
But you know as well as we do, texting has is advantages and disadvantages. We've had entire sexual relationships develop over text messages and had other relationships fall to shit via the same medium. But can we really complain about how easy text messaging has made it to get laid? Because obviously you cannot:
About three months ago, I ran into Scott, who is charming and adorable and something of a scoundrel. We chatted and exchanged numbers, whatever, blah-blah. Later that week, I was five pints into an evening with friends and feeling the impatient, irrational call to action of someone who overstayed her welcome on the bar stool. Here's an idea, I thought: I should call Scott! But I was too shy, or too slurry, to actually make a phone call. What I could easily do -- well, what I could do with one eye squinted a bit -- was to type out a note to him and toss it to the satellites. I like to think what I wrote was clever and funny. I suspect it was, "Whatcha doin?"
He was there in less than 30 minutes. Like a pizza.
It was brilliant. So fast! So simple! If only everything in life could be so complication-free. I have always been the girl who wants to keep the party going, who doesn't want to go home when the bar lights cruelly flicker on. I would never dream of calling someone at 2 a.m. -- OK, I would, and I have, and I'm sorry -- but suddenly, with text messaging, I could just send an unobtrusive "You still out?" to the call list and voilà: instant after-party.
A few days later, Scott texted me at 2 a.m., and I redirected my taxi to his place.
So here's the problem: There's a reason why drunk-dialing someone at 2 a.m. invokes shame and embarrassment. It's because we probably shouldn't be doing it. What we should be doing is taking our asses home, drinking half a bottle of Gatorade and crashing into bed. My drunk self really doesn't need new and improved ways to stay out later, to get into more trouble, to do things I will ultimately regret. Maybe it shouldn't be so easy to get into someone's bedroom at 2 a.m.
Hey, Sarah. What'd you do after that party Friday night, huh? Because after you left we totally started in on the drunk texting around 2 a.m. And we saw you clicking away on that little phone of yours. Hopefully you had better luck than we did.
[Salon: U still up?]