Her Cocktail, His Beer

Her Cocktail – Danielle Tullo

Every girl has a track star hidden within her who comes out when she’s waiting for a text from that one guy. Her phone could be set just a few feet away, but as soon as it starts to ring she is sprinting full force towards that 5-inch piece of aluminum thinking, “Yes, it’s him!”  Poor girl. We know where this story ends, the phone is lighting up with many names, but never the one she wants.

“Never” is too strong of a word, but he doesn’t text you as often as you would like, so it pretty much feels like never. You would think that texting makes communicating with a guy easier, but it actually makes things more complicated.

When you’re finally texting the boy you like, little things have you thinking that he wants nothing to do with you. For instance, using the grammatically correct but evil period.

Nothing makes you think someone is trying to blow you off more than when they use a period. You ask him how his day has been so far, and he responds with, “Good.” Obviously this means that he finds you annoying, and wants the conversation to end …

No, actually, he just has really good grammar and likes to use it while texting. Why has text messaging come to this? We read into every detail and find problems that aren’t even there. If someone didn’t want to talk to you they just wouldn’t answer, isn’t that obvious? Yet we like to drive ourselves insane.

Let’s talk about the use of acronyms that really lead you to believe it is over.  Once again, you’re texting the same boy and you ask him what his plans are for the night and he responds with “idk.” You think to yourself that he doesn’t want to tell you what he’s doing tonight because he doesn’t want to see you.

Wrong again. He truthfully doesn’t know what he’s doing tonight, and he’s in the middle of a video game with his roommates while they’re drinking some beers. He is more focused on winning his game of Madden 13 than spelling out “I don’t know,” in your conversation.

The moral of this texting story is that girls do it differently. We love to use exclamation points, emojis are necessary, and sending novels are acceptable. So the next time you’re sprinting to your phone to answer his text, remember that it’s the way he talks to you in person, not the way he texts you behind his phone.

His Beer – Salvatore Trifilio

While I am usually one who welcomes the advancement of technology with open arms, I must say that if I ever met the man who invented the SMS text message, I would surely run him down in a crosswalk.

While I cannot speak for every man out there, I am almost certain I speak for most when I say that text messaging might be the worst invention ever conceived.

Think about it: Some dude is sitting around his college dorm room one day thinking to himself, you know what’s really difficult?  Communicating with women.

You know what would make it exponentially more difficult?  If we took all body language and direct verbal communication out of the equation.  Perfect, now I get to be overanalyzed by the girl I’m talking to, even when I’m not in her presence.

Ask any guy out there, ladies.  Most of us would rather you call, tell us what you want in ten minutes, and let us get back to designing an ingenious 85-yard drive in Madden 25.  But no, instead let’s drag this conversation out over the next couple hours.  I’m sure my friends won’t get annoyed that I keep pausing the game every five seconds.

And god forbid if we decide it is important to shower, eat, or go to the gym leaving us unable to text you back for the next 10 minutes to an hour.  At that point we might as well tell you we never want to speak to you again and we were never interested in the first place.

“Food?”

“Basketball?”

“MNF?”

Three letters on that last one and I have successfully communicated to my best bud that I’m curious if he would be interested in watching Monday Night Football, throwing back a couple brews and maybe, if we’re feeling ambitious, crush a pizza.

But if I say “OK” to that girl I met on Friday night, I’ve already lost.

What happened to the time when having good game meant being confident, knowing how to dress and, most importantly, knowing how to speak to a female?

How is it possible that there’s something that exists that is more annoying than Facebook?

As I sit here at the bar of The Levee finishing my bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale, I cringe at the thought of the next text message I will have to send.  The bitter irony: I wrote this all through a text message.