Text messaging etiquette

I realized tonight only a few boys can get away with using smiley faces and other emoticons when sending me text messages: my best friend from freshman year, Matthew; my best friend from sophomore year, Jeff; and the original best friend from what is now nearly FOUR years ago, Marcas.

As I pondered on my annoyance from receiving text messages with emoticons from a boy, I figured this was a good time to lay down the law as far as my text messaging preferences are concerned, whether it's males or females sending the messages.

1) Use proper grammar, spelling and punctuation at all costs. It kills me to have to take out an apostrophe in order to keep a message under 160 characters. It kills me to see people do it when there's no reason to as well.

2) Don't try to have legit conversations about important matters via tex messaging. With some people this works; I do it with a select few. For the most part, use texting to set things up and then either a) talk on the phone or b) talk in person.

3) If you insist on using emoticons/smileys, fine. Just limit yourself: use one per message. No funny business with a smiling one and then a winking one.

4) Try to respond as quickly as possible. Sometimes, just like with phone calls, message cannot be returned that quickly. However, if you respond to one message within mere minutes, it should not take half an hour to respond to the next.

5) On par with responding quickly, respond. Even if you can no longer actually help someone or they probably have had a question answered, it's just common courtesy to at least respond with, well, something.

That's pretty much it. I'm sure there are other things that bug me about text messaging but if people would/would not do each of these things accordingly, I think the world would be a little bit of a better place.

Last YouTube video I watched: Top 7 Tips for Life

Anna Howard Shaw Day

I figured a holiday like Valentine's Day deserved a post full of my thoughts on this "commercialized" holiday and, of course, on love.

As far as commercialization is concerned, I'm not too worried about it all. It can be annoying how pervasive such a sort of weird holiday is, but I feel like it at least has some merit. Even without a significant other, it's still nice to let friends and family know you care. It's just another excuse to do so.

Now that's out of the way, let's talk about love. What is love? (Baby, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me no more.) Haddaway aside, it's a pretty quality thing, at least from what I've experienced. I've never had a significant other on Valentine's Day, nor has that ever bothered me. I would say this year is the closest I've ever been to having such a person in my life, but I honestly could not care less that I don't. Since I spend all my time in one building on campus, I was hardly around enough people to even realize that today was different than any other day.

But as for love itself . . . People talk about it a lot here at BYU, and at times it is incredibly annoying. Other times it's all in good fun, like the time I went on the record in Lorraine's birthday video saying a year from now she'll be engaged or at least dating the boy she's going to marry. When we talk about our missionary friends, it just gets depressing. But every now and then you have a genuinely interesting conversation about love.

This afternoon I met up w/ my friend Becca and somehow we got on the subject of love languages. (I say "somehow" but I know exactly how we got there.) Everyone communicates love and feelings in different ways and the love languages splits that up into five things: physical touch, acts of service, quality time, words of affirmation and receiving gifts. This kind of stuff is very fascinating to me, along with the whole color personality dealio. Communication is just so cool. And communication in relationships is even cooler. When I just looked at the names of these so-called languages I immediately knew I was a "quality time" person. The older I've gotten the more I've come to realize how much I enjoy spending time with people one-on-one or in small groups. And as I read descriptions of these other love languages it was more and more confirmed to me that I just need to be with someone to be happy with them.

I think some of it stems from the fact that I always make time for other people. I keep my phone with me constantly and hardly ever on silent because I want to be able to help people if they need it. If I say I'll attend something w/ someone, I go. And I'm on time too. So when people make time for me and are with me because they want to be or if I ask them to be around, it's a huge deal. To me it basically translate as, "I could be doing any number of other things, but I'm not. I'm with you instead. Because you're important to me."

There's a fancy little quiz you can take if you're not sure what your love language is too. I am overwhelmingly all about "quality time," but I've known people to be split much more evenly. It really is an interesting topic.

In closing, love is pretty cool. I'm quite fond of it. I'll probably watch The Office tonight to celebrate it . . . or something like that.

Last YouTube video I watched: Yes, haterz, these are real

And if you got the reference in this blog post's title . . . Will you be my Valentine?