It’s a long, loong weekend for me. It’s Chinese New Year weekend and I am stuck with no one but my two loyal, fluffy teddy bears. All my friends are gone for the holiday and celebrating. (Which I find it very strange since I am pretty sure none of them are of chinese descendent or married to one!)
Four uneventful, lonesome days proved to much for me, so I did exactly what a socially retarded dude like me would do in time like this - I went and checked out the internet chat rooms.
You can talk pretty much about anything to pretty much anybody on the internet, but people can behave appallingly in chat rooms. You probably innocently popped in with a casual inquiry about the whether and bam, you’d receive a lot of messages asking if you are menstruating.
This is both astonishing and unbelievably scary. Well, unless, you are really into "that", that’s fine with me but I think I better off talking about gardening, ancient history or pressing wild flowers or something. So excuse me for being a prude.
And then there this new way of communicating which made me realized I haven’t probably been in internet chat rooms, gee, for quite sometime. People now love to write in a hurry, you know, the incredibly keystroke-saving letter combination or grouping punctuations to form pictures, as if they were ancient egyptian symbols.
In fact my messages were filled with such ‘codes’, it could send to space: lol for "laugh out loud", brb for "be right back" and ic for "I see" and didkwaysimawpakirirabdwi for "damn, I don’t know what are you saying, I might as well press any key in random in reply and be done with it".
Usually, I do have a very good instinct and great at deciphering and decoding things. I live for meaning. In fact, just the other day, my housemate accused me of talking to a stray dog. (I named her Joy). I am that good when it comes to 'unintelligent' communication.
But this one message stumbled me. One message so laden with enigmatic codes it completely threw me off guard. It took a great mind and even greater patience to remotely convinced myself that this person didn’t just throw insult at me.
Horny toad: I m m****, asl, u 1 sx?
Me (Sexy amoeba): :0 (wide-mouthed surprise)
Horny toad: u m?
Me: ;) (knowing wink)
Horny toad: u no ne f?
Me: :O (even greater surprise, or maybe that’s a pig)
Horny toad: #-)
Me: “{}+:?>< (Of course I made that one up).
Yeah, that was stupid and I was bumped out but hey at least it was mentally stimulating.
And the great thing about internet chatting is that you are completely in control of the situation. In the last resort you can just log off.
N (for ‘end’)
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