Old

I got old, and I noticed the moment when it happened. It's when, all of a sudden, there is a practice which is common among the youth of the day, that you find completely incomprehensible.

Here's what happened:

Reading a NY Times article a few weeks ago about teens and Twitter (by the way, do you all know that I tweet?), they mentioned the case of Kristen Nagy, 18, to illustrate the case of a teen who sends a lot of text messages, but doesn't use Twitter. How much does she text? Let me tell you. She sends 500 text messages per day!

What???

500 texts per day? Over the 16 waking-hours of a day, that's a little more than one text every two minutes. For 16-hours straight! If it takes you 15 seconds to send one text, that's more than two hours spent sending 15-second text messages, not including the time it takes to read the messages you receive.

Trying to understand this, I compared this to my experience. Esther and I have unlimited texting included in our plans to go along with our text-friendly phones. Sometimes, when we get really crazy, we might send 15 texts per day. But 500? That's simply incomprehensible. I can't even imagine why someone would ever want to do that. It's stupid. It doesn't make sense. It makes me a little mad. I just don't understand.

And that's it, now I'm old. Kids are doing something and I, despite all my blogs, Twitter feeds, RSS subscriptions and social networks, simply can't wrap my head around it. Does not compute.

I think it's only going to get worse from here.