L8r

I'm really bad at using all that slang-type stuff while emailing. I always figured that it was just because I have a whole qwerty keyboard available with all the letters and it wasn't that hard to type words out in their entirety, you know? There are some words I shorten, but in general, I'd rather type a cheerful, "Later!" than "haha lol l8r" in an email.

So when I got a cell phone I thought that since I was finally closer technology-wise to my peers, perhaps I would magically start typing like them. But it's not easy to remember to shorten words, and sometimes I'll be texting and remember halfway through a word that there's a shorter way of putting it, so I'll delete what I wrote and use the shorter version. By that point, of course, enough time has been wasted that I might as well have just used the word I was trying to type in the first place.

It makes me feel like perhaps I missed out on the gene most people my age have, the one that lets you do stuff like that. And I'm not perfect--I'm a terrible speller, and sometimes say things like "bother" instead of "brother," but that short-hand computer language just isn't something I'm good at.

What I am good at? At least mildly so? Riding a bike and texting. Try it sometime, it's harder than it looks!