Well it’s that dreaded time again. Sum­mer is com­ing to a close and each sec­ond that passes means the school year is com­ing closer and closer to fruition. While most peo­ple absolutely detest and hate school, I actu­ally don’t mind it so much. This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy sum­mer, because I cer­tainly do, how­ever school allows me to see all my friends, and it gives me some­thing to do for the major­ity of the day. So as worth­less as a medium of edu­cat­ing as high school is, it cer­tainly isn’t as bad as peo­ple make it out to be.

Last year was cer­tainly a ran­dom one for me. I started out the year with a girl­friend who I absolutely adored at the time, a solid con­tin­gency of friends, and a gen­eral sense of what I wanted to accom­plish. For me these are all things that usu­ally come much later in the school year, so I guess one could say I had a great start. Yet, despite hav­ing such a great start things began to spi­ral down­ward for me. The ladies left me emo­tion­ally con­fused and baf­fled for the greater half of the school year. My friend­ships con­tin­ued to mature and grow more numer­ous, yet I appre­ci­ated them less. Finally, I was stray­ing heav­ily from all of my pro­jected aca­d­e­mic and ath­letic accom­plish­ments. To be hon­est, it was a real chal­lenge for me, as I sim­ply felt frus­trated for the major­ity of the school year. While I may have gone through what I con­sider an innu­mer­able amount of fail­ures my Junior year, I can’t help but feel as if I accom­plished a lot. First and fore­most I became an indi­vid­ual. My defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics such as my sense of humor, my work ethic,  set of morals, etc  all became  more defined  and  poignant within me. My matu­rity level increased ten fold, and for the first time in my life I was able to rec­og­nize and accept respon­si­bil­ity with­out the imme­di­ate promise of a reward.  Through park­our, and rid­ing my bike I also began rec­og­niz­ing the beau­ti­ful things in the world, and how nice it is just to be free and enjoy one­self in nature. So while it can be con­cluded that I fell short on the spec­trum of worldly accom­plish­ments, this Junior year.  I also began to regard myself in a new light, and I feel as if that is an invalu­able accom­plish­ment in and out of itself.

So what is in store for my Senior year? Well as I do my sum­mer home­work I can already tell I’m going to be busy. AP Eng­lish calls for me to read two nov­els, and 20 poems/ short sto­ries over the sum­mer in order to pre­pare for the three tests I have to take in that class on the first day of school. I also joined the aca­d­e­mic decathlon team, which is an edu­ca­tional time sink. On top of that I am receiv­ing lessons from two dif­fer­ent piano teach­ers, might be coach­ing a flag foot­ball team, and I will be join­ing a club swim team some­time around Novem­ber. Oh and did I men­tion I still have to film a few movies, run a cou­ple of plays, and do col­lege appli­ca­tions?  This isn’t to say that I am com­plain­ing, on the con­trary,  I am actu­ally quite con­fi­dent in my abil­ity to han­dle it all this year.  I am just to high­light­ing the fact that I will have a lot to con­tend with but for­tu­nately I’m learn­ing to man­age my time much bet­ter, and as far as I can tell, I am tak­ing classes in sub­jects that all inter­est me so I should have a fight­ing chance at being suc­cess­ful this year.

Already I can tell this is going to be a year of goodbye’s and end­ings.  No I don’t mean  the fake “ZOMG GUYZ  CAN YOU BELIEVE WE ARE TEH SENIORS!?!? I WILL NEVAR FORGET YOU ALL!”. What I mean is that a lot of my great friend­ships are going to have to end, I will have to say good­bye to those that are close to me, and finally my cur­rent lifestyle and way of han­dling myself is also going to end.  The word “end” cer­tainly brings up a plethora of neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions, but it’s a fact of being a Senior, and I think it’s some­thing that I will be will­ing to han­dle once the time comes.

On the plus side, things have never been bet­ter for me. I am in great shape, I have a girl­friend who absolutely kicks ass, my self dis­ci­pline has never been greater, and to sum it all up things are click­ing on all cylin­ders at the moment. I am a tad bit weary that I will have a repeat of Junior year, in which things started off great, but slowly dwin­dled down­wards. But as the say­ing goes, the sun is bright­est before the twi­light, and I have a feel­ing my twi­light is going to come at the end of the year when I have to say good­bye to every­one and every­thing. So what are my goals for senior year? First off get a 4.0 as all of my classes should be man­age­able. Make movies, and get accepted to Chap­man.  Make Var­sity for swim­ming. Go to all the dances with my girl­friend. Go to all the foot­ball games ( or at least all the ones that mat­ter). Do well in aca­d­e­mic decathlon. Finally, do enough in which I can look back on my senior year and real­ize that I gave it my all and have absolutely no regrets on any missed oppor­tu­ni­ties. Obvi­ously, I have my work cut out for me, but what else am I going to do with myself?

Around March of my Junior year, one could say that I was a very lonely guy. The swim sea­son was in full gear and I was basi­cally rav­aging my body every­day at prac­tice, only to come home and do a ton of home­work, go to sleep, wake up go to school, rinse wash and repeat. Now I am not com­plain­ing about the fact that I had a rather rig­or­ous sched­ule at the time, in high school that is the sort of thing that hap­pens. How­ever, I sim­ply didn’t have enough time to prop­erly social­ize with peo­ple, yet alone talk to them out­side of lunch (in which case I was prob­a­bly down­ing too much food to talk any­ways), and so I felt a bit like a loner. One day on my way home from prac­tice my phone makes this weird sound that I had never heard before. It cer­tainly wasn’t a phone call, nor was it a voice mail, so curi­ously I opened it and saw a “text” message.

See­ing as how it was from a girl, I had to reply to her. After all, if I didn’t it would be con­sid­ered rude right? When I fin­ished reply­ing to that text I got another one in response, of course I had to reply to that one too because the girl was ask­ing me a ques­tion, then I got a text from some­one else once they knew I had text mes­sag­ing, and then another text came in, and another, and well you get the pic­ture. At first I didn’t mind any of this in the least bit. After all it was social­iz­ing with other peo­ple, and that was some­thing that I had sourly lacked mid-swim sea­son. My only prob­lem was that my phone hap­pened to be ancient, it was prob­a­bly built in 2003, and thus it would freeze for min­utes if I hap­pened to get two text mes­sages at once. Typ­ing the damn things on my phone’s key­pad wasn’t too easy either, but I man­aged and after a few days I was a rel­a­tively swift texter.

For a short while tex­ting was sweet, I could pass mes­sages on to friends with­out hav­ing to engage myself com­pletely by talk­ing to them, and I was also bet­ter with writ­ing out words as opposed to speak­ing them. But then things grew bit­ter, and fast. Girls would start tex­ting me expect­ing me to engage them in long ele­gant con­ver­sa­tions (which I did), how­ever they could only repay me with insult­ing one word responses. Soon I began look­ing at my phone every few min­utes to see if I had a text, and when I was engaged in a “con­ver­sa­tion” those ratios were even worse. Home­work began tak­ing me for­ever as I began to text while I did it, and I am pretty sure the qual­ity of my work fell too. All in all tex­ting was begin­ning to eat away at me, I was get­ting addicted to it, and worse of all it was suck­ing my time from me.

Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief my social skills also seemed to plum­met. The peo­ple who I texted, I had dif­fi­culty talk­ing to in real life as we couldn’t think of new and inter­est­ing things to talk to each other about, since we had talked about every­thing we pos­si­bly could via tex­ting. While eat­ing, and hang­ing out with friends and fam­ily, times which are ideal for nat­ural social­iza­tion, I would often iso­late myself by tex­ting oth­ers. I sup­pose I thought I could pay atten­tion to both my tex­ting con­ver­sa­tion and my real life one, but what ended up hap­pen­ing was that my atten­tion to both fell sharply. All in all, it sim­ply hit a point where I knew tex­ting was tak­ing a toll on me, and I had to say enough. So around July of this sum­mer I offi­cially gave up texting.

This was prob­a­bly one of the best deci­sions that I have made in quite a while. Even before I started tex­ting, I knew the ideas and con­cepts behind the whole thing where stu­pid, but when I was finally con­fronted with it I sim­ply couldn’t say no. Allow me to list off all of the rea­sons why tex­ting is bad, espe­cially in regards to being social. First off its’ an inef­fi­cient form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, it takes for­ever to type up mes­sages, and even then the mes­sages are lim­ited to only 160 or so char­ac­ters. Aside from very brief mes­sages that are only sup­posed to get a short response in return (which I sup­pose tex­ting was designed for), any other rea­son for tex­ting is absolutely point­less and inef­fi­cient. Now let’s also explore the social dynam­ics of tex­ting. Say some­one sends out a text hop­ing to start a con­ver­sa­tion but the per­son who they texted didn’t respond within the past few hours. This could mean any num­ber of things. The per­son being texted could be angry at the con­ver­sa­tion starter, the per­son being texted could be in trou­ble and might need help, or maybe the per­son being texted might sim­ply be busy and just doesn’t have their phone on them. While it could be argued that if one knows the per­son they’re tex­ting well enough they can assume their rea­son­ing for a delayed response, there’s no doubt that this presents a tremen­dous amount of ambi­gu­ity in com­par­i­son to a phone call or a per­son to per­son con­ver­sa­tion. In a social envi­ron­ment, this ambi­gu­ity can man­i­fest itself and makes things very dif­fi­cult as far as try­ing to con­nect with the other per­son. Speak­ing of con­nect­ing, try­ing to do so with another per­son via text is nearly impos­si­ble. “But wait” you say “Writ­ing with words gives you a chance to think about what you say, you can make much bet­ter con­ver­sa­tion that way”. Well as much as I love writ­ten words, they are designed for con­vey­ing infor­ma­tion, not emo­tion. There­fore, they sim­ply can’t com­pete with voice to voice com­mu­ni­ca­tion as far as relay­ing emo­tion, tone, and the plethora of other sub­con­scious indi­ca­tors nec­es­sary to make a con­nec­tion. Sure one can chose their words wisely, but those words could be inter­preted in an entirely dif­fer­ent fash­ion from what they are intended to mean. For instance say some­one flirt­ing with another per­son and they call that per­son a loser. There is a very real pos­si­bil­ity that the other per­son could think that they are being insulted, and that is a seri­ous risk when it comes to tex­ting for socializing.

What it all comes down to is the fact that as humans we have never had as many ways to com­mu­ni­cate with one another. Yet, instead of striv­ing to make things more inti­mate by uti­liz­ing the all too avail­able voice to voice com­mu­ni­ca­tion that we have today. We choose to hide behind our words with things like email, tex­ting, and even AIM. Now these medi­ums of word based com­mu­ni­ca­tion do have their ben­e­fits, how­ever I feel as if the major­ity of peo­ple are using these medi­ums for the wrong pur­poses, and in par­tic­u­lar that is social­iz­ing. As humans our emo­tions are designed to respond to our senses, which are sight, touch, smell, hear­ing, and taste. Words are not a sense, and thus we have dif­fi­culty for­mu­lat­ing an authen­tic emo­tional response to them. If you don’t believe me I chal­lenge you to try this exper­i­ment. Find some­one who you would absolutely love dat­ing, and text them as much as you pos­si­bly can. Talk to them about any­thing and every­thing. Use the advan­tage of pick­ing your words wisely and make your­self appear as inter­est­ing of a per­son as you pos­si­bly can. Now, go find some­one who you’ve barely met and do some­thing inti­mate with­out talk­ing to them too much. Hug them, kiss them, cud­dle them, lick them, do what­ever, just do some­thing that evokes their senses. Now at the end of the exper­i­ment here’s prob­a­bly what’s going to hap­pen. The per­son you have texted for months on end prob­a­bly knows you really well, yet I can guar­an­tee that you prob­a­bly don’t feel very inti­mate with them. On the other hand, you prob­a­bly feel incred­i­bly inti­mate with the per­son who just met despite the fact that you don’t know much about them. Why is this? We respond to our senses not our words.

So to all you pussies out their that think tex­ting is a good and clever way to get the ladies, I say good luck with that. I’ll be mak­ing out with the girl who I just met because I’m not too afraid to appeal to her senses. Oh and in com­par­i­son to the 1,500+ texts that I’ve sent from march till about July when I gave up tex­ting. I’ve only sent about 70 or so texts for the remain­der of the sum­mer. Most of which where sim­ply to fig­ure out times for meet­ing peo­ple, and all that good stuff. So yes, tex­ting does have its pur­pose, but it is NOT for socializing.