I gave her my heart and she LOL'd at me

There are some parts of the United States that do not have SMS on mobile phone services. Lucky them, I say, because last week, my fingers slipped and a mis-sent SMS meant I had to endure the embarrassment of having coffee with my mother at this swanky coffee place in Holland Village where it isn't cool to have coffee with your mother.

A friend, Christian Lee, an American Chinese actor currently plying his trade in Singapore, has recently acquired RSI from SMSing incessantly, flirting outrageously, so he says, with some girl probably clutching her phone with a thumb over the keypad while riding on the MRT or something, vigilant and ready to stab at it with her thumbnail. He proudly showed me a message that read something to the effect of C U 2nite. Will brng my schl unfrm. He says he can't get enough of it, SMS, that is, and thinks that its been a boon to his social life more than anything else. I don't seem to get the same benefits from SMS, and I don't think its because I am not an imported expatriate Pan-Asian semi-celebrity. It's the phone, I tell you. Or maybe I should change providers from Singtel to MOne, because the people in their ads look like they really have more fun.

Maybe I am the only person on the island who bemoans some sort of loss at the advent of SMS, ICQ, IRC and other miscellaneous techno-gadgetry to do with communication. You can no longer sit on the bus and let your mind wander and wonder how your significant other is doing. You can no longer interchange visions of her smiling or frowning or gliding through fields of green, as and when you have that yearning to know about her. Because just as soon as you do, your thumb goes to work on the keypad of your trusty GSM phone, and everything you want to know about her or her state of mind comes back to that little screen in the form of a :)

I don't know about you, but I would suffer disturbing images of my significant other as a round smiley face bouncing through fields of green.

That is, if I had a significant other. Eager to try because all else hasn't quite worked, I took Christian's recommendation and tried SMS flirting. But of course, you first had to get someone's mobile phone number before you could do that. Somehow, I did, and clumsily started out with How now brown cow or something equally lame. The recipient took all of ten seconds to reply with LOL, ok. Encouraged, I launched into short, snipped quips about the weather, work and politics, all of which garnered the response, "LOL", sometimes followed with something like "OK" or "I like that".

Emboldened now, I thumbed "thnk ur really hot, cnt stp thnkg abt u", stumbling over what I thought were standard abbreviated spelling for this abbreviated prattle exchange.

There was a pause that felt like an eternity before I got a reply for that one. You know, just long enough for you to have the shrinking horror of wondering whether you've mis-sent a message to your mother again, because as far as I know (and that isn't too much of a distance) you can't tell if you've sent an SMS to the wrong person until you end up having coffee with your mother at Holland Village.

I don't have to tell you that she did finally reply, and the message was "LOL".


~April 2001.