spoken and written, backing in or backing out

I've always hated telephone calls.  I don't like the way you they intrude into my life and I have to deal with them whether I am in the mood or not.  Sometimes a long drunk phone call to an old friend is alright, but alright mostly from the viewpoint of the drunk.  Another trouble with long phone calls to old friends is sometimes it's hard to hang up.  If you are sitting with your old pal in the bar every time you finish a beer you have an opportunity to say well I gotta go, but on the telephone if you want to end the conversation you have to do this thing where you just stop bringing things up and wait for the other person to run out of things and then maybe there will be an awkward pause and then you can broach the subject of hanging up, and then sometimes when you are about to hang up the other person suddenly remembers something and the conversation goes back to full force and then you have to go through that whole process of getting around to the hang up again.

An email you compose at your leisure.  If you are replying there is the letter you are replying to right there, and you can calmly address all points one by one.  If something doesn't look elegantly phrased you can rephrase it, you can hone it, just as we hone our posts here at The Institute.  And when you send it, there is no irritating noise in the recipients domicile.  No, it sits silently on some disc in outer cyberspace until the recipient is in the mood to receive information, and then ping, there it is.  Nice, very nice.

And nicer still because we don't have to fiddle with an envelope and remember where we kept those sticky stamps, which we had to lick back then, but not anymore, and then you would have to set it somewhere near the door where you would remember to pick it up the next time you went out, and then you would have to alter your path so that you went by a mailbox.  One thing though, that plunk when you put your letter into the slot and let that drawer slam shut, that was pretty satisfying, more satisfying than the click on send.  But still overall a very laborious process.

But apparently even the ease of email is not enough and people prefer texting which myself I think is actually harder, nicking on that little keyboard.   I think it's the difference between spoken and written language.

Of course we are born into spoken language, but written language is something we have to go out of our way to learn.  Some of us, like ourselves, take to it right away, how you can move the words around like on a chessboard and make them into something effective, and, dare I say, pretty.  Other people learn it because they have to, so they won't have to stay in the third grade the rest of their life, so that they can become the CEO of their very own Fortune 500 company, and I guess they read whatever you have to read to get to that place, but they don't read any books, they don't write any letters.

What I am trying to get to is that I think texting is more akin to the spoken rather than the written word.  If you look at it it has no elegance.  Put into the an email it would look ignorant, but it's right at home in the world of texting, and that's why people prefer texting.

Well that was satisfying.  I may not have crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's, but I have managed to call people who do something that I don't like ignorant, so that feels good.

But I have left all the other burning issues aside, so let's see.

When I was down in Champaign over the Fourth, in the midst of all the good cheer of friends who haven't seen each other for a year sitting at a table full of beers, out came the duper phones and within a minute we were all over fb.  Some people like that stuff, some people when they can't make it to an event ask you to take photos for them.  I don't know why, they just do.

In the brief time I owned an automobile I never owned a garage.  Growing up in the great bungalow belt on the southwest side everybody had a garage at the back of the lot that faced the alley.  My dad always drove in headfirst and near as I can recall so did everybody else in the hood.  It seems to me that backing into the alley or into the garage are equal work so why should one be preferable.  Actually it occurs to me that probably backing into the alley is easier because you have more room to maneuver out there.  I get the impression that my two colleagues will disagree with this, and of course, that is satisfying.