#151 — Short Answers

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My son isn’t speaking to me anymore. Instead he texts, tweets and updates his Facebook profile. From what I can infer, he’s doing fine.

I have trouble understanding his messages because I’m not fluent in “text”. Unlike him, I’m not a native speaker. He makes fun of my text messages and says that I’m old-fashioned and anybody hip to the real lingo can tell I’m not a cool cat. (Whenever I talk like that he just rolls his eyes.)

If I send him a perfectly reasonable message like, “I’m guessing you’re out of groceries and need to do your laundry. Do you plan to come home this weekend? Love, Dad” He answers with some cryptic note like “AFAIK”. When I seek clarification with, “I’m sorry. I didn’t quite get that,” he responds with a testy, “AS FAR AS I KNOW.” If I ask him why he didn’t just say that in the first place he texts back, “Don’t make me waste letters.”

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Like this excerpt? Want the whole story? Listen to the audio version by clicking the ‘Play’ button at the top of this post. If you’d rather read it, you can find the full text at http://myfavoriteshortcomings.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/short-answers/

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Notes:

• My thanks to Clinton of Comedy4Cast for letting me borrow a couple of his characters — Nomad451 and Lenny Treetop — for this essay.  Clinton’s podcast is one of my favorites and is clean and very, very funny.  You can find it at:
  http://www.comedy4cast.com
• Despite the fact that I poked fun at Twitter, I’m really a big fan.  You can find me at:
  http://www.twitter.com/KevinLeeC
• Also, the Twitter pals I mentioned on the show were Melas and OgreKev.  The Twitter couple I mentioned are Garazi and Stefsull.
• Thanks to the following podcasts for playing my promo:
  http://theweirdshow.com/
  http://www.dragonpage.com/
• Finally, just to show you that real life is nearly always stranger than fiction, the proposal I mentioned in the show is real.  Read about it here:
  http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/03/sweetest-tweet.html