[texting tirade]

Clarification: this post is a tirade about texting, not a tirade via texting.

Now, I love to text. Sometimes you are in a situation where information is needed but you cannot talk on the phone, so you text. Maybe you need to share a quick tidbit of information, but its not so overly important that you need a response immediately, so you text. Sometimes you just feel like texting, so you text. I am perfectly fine with that. What I am not okay with though is the current trend I see in my fellow college-aged peers of using texting as an excuse for good manners. For instance, that image on the left is one of the top shared bumper stickers on Facebook at the moment. Since when has an awkward situation ever been alleviated by texting? Not only does it make it more awkward since one person is now actively ignoring the other, but the situation will still be there once you're done texting. The beauty and the curse of texting: it usually takes a short amount of time.

Another example of this, the one that really bugs me and I try my best to not ever do myself, is when you are having a face-to-face conversation with someone and they start texting mid-convo. This usually results in the texter not paying attention to the person in front of them and having to ask for whatever was said while they answered their life-or-death important text message to be repeated. I understand that texts are important and should be checked as soon as they can upon arrival, but at least excuse yourself from any live conversations you may currently be involved in so that you don't appear like a self-absorbed jerk.

Maybe its just me, but I think that my generation, THE texting generation, needs to figure out how to balance real life interactions with those fed through their QWERTY keyboards...

[a peck of characters]

Halloween this year was one of my favorites to date. I personally love dressing up as much as I can, whether its in business attire for the copious number of job/graduate fairs at UCF, fancy attire for the random nice night out with my friends or costume, which is unfortunately basically limited to fan conventions or Halloween. So I tend to go all out costume-wise around this time of year.

Conveniently, Halloween fell on a Saturday this year - which means parties were being held starting on Wednesday [welcome to college]. I attended 3 parties: my job's annual  Halloween party on Friday and two parties different parties held by friends, one Friday, one Saturday. Over the course of the weekend, I was a Slytherin student [my fall-back, fall-back costume that I where any time I possibly can], a geisha [my fall-back costume from 2007] and a jester! My jester costume was made from scratch [bar the leotard] by my lovely roommate Christine and yours truly. To the right is the only full-length photo of me in my costume with the face paint on; my friend Stephanie went as a PETA poster, haha.

The best part of the weekend though? Gaining an extra hour of sleep Saturday night. YESSS! I'm already staying up late and wasting the few days I have of actually feeling the effects of that extra hour, but alas.

Nothing specific in that entry title, other that I like the unit of measurement known as a peck and the world is full of characters, but more so on Halloween. And there it is.