Because the Pen is Mightier

I am a writer. Always have been. By "writer," I do not mean, under any circumstances, that I do it professionally, nor do I presume to be good at it. What I mean is that I am a "write-er," as in, I write. A lot. About a lot of things. I write in journals. I blog. I write letters and notes and cards and emails. I just WRITE. Prolifically.

I am that person who had an orgasm when I found out that, not only was there a DICTIONARY in the INTERNET, but a COMPLETE THESAURUS as well. I dig words. Verbage. I like to roll them around on my tongue and see how they come out.

There is something so beautiful about writing - especially writing letters. I firmly believe that if the world communicated through letters, we would never have wars. You don't have to say anything you don't mean - you have every opportunity to revise and review and revise some more. If you don't, it's your own damned fault. :)

So here's where I'm going with this.

I was listening to the radio on my way home from work. On Monday mornings, I'm so tired that I can't ever bring myself to change the station, so I end up listening to whatever Mike was listening to on Sunday afternoons (*the exception to this is Johnny Dare - no amount of exhaustion could make me listen to that man).

Sometimes, I get a great education from Steve Harvey ("What in the name of Hezekiah walking do you think you're doing?!?"), and others I end up with "Shorty & the Boyz" (who comes up with this crap?). Today it just happened to be Dick Dale & Company (96.5 THE BUZZ). Apparently, a girlfriend of a morning show member had broken up with him via text message.

Dick Dale was completely appalled by this. "Who does this?" he exclaimed. "Who would break up with someone by voicemail or in an email or something?!?"

'ME!' I thought. Now before you panic, no, I have never broken up with someone by emailing them. I have been accused, several times, of improperly addressing sensitive subjects in an email.

But why is this wrong? Would it be wrong if I sent this correspondence certified post? Does it demonstrate a lack of effort on my part? Because lemme just tell ya, that email that it took you ten minutes to read took me eight days to send. I went over that thing with a fine tooth comb, hoping and praying that it sounded professional, that it conveyed exactly what I wanted it to convey - sure, I could've met you at Starbucks, said everything that I didn't want to say, gotten completely off track when I saw that god-awful purse that woman was carrying when she left the store, bitched about the whiny kid three tables over, and gotten home and realized that half of what needed to be said didn't even get mentioned!

Instead, I sent an email. I sent an email that I put more care and thought into than I ever could have put into spoken word. If you think that by sending an email I am showing a lack of respect for you, you're mistaken. I showed you more respect than you could ever know by reading and re-reading and deleting and re-typing and sleeping on it and re-setting it to draft status and trying again.

And I assure you - it was properly punctuated, the grammar was checked (as was the spelling), and if anything is actually wrong with that letter, it was Bill Gates' fault. Or the CEO at Yahoo. Or Google. Depends on where the email's coming from. Either way, I'm not one of those abbreviatin'-internet-short-hand-mis-spelling-looks-like-you-failed-the-third-grade kind of emailers.

So if you happen to get an email from me and you think to yourself, "What in the name of Hezekiah walking *is* this? Why would she say this in an EMAIL?", be grateful, because my online presence beats the hell out of real life.