text addict

i got my first text from the scort many years ago. he sent me a zero. i didn't know how to do it but i thought i was pretty cool. a few years later, heidi, the super secretary in the film office, showed me one afternoon how to text on my phone. i don't know if it dominoed to my other friends but it suddenly seemed as if we were all texting each other; maybe they were just waiting for me to find my way out of the late nineties.

soon, it became apparent that the 50 complimentary texts on my plan would not be enough and i added the option for 300 texts. not long after i moved to the red door i outgrew that, too. i don't remember if 800 was the next option, but i have been on "unlimited texts" for several years now.

my blue flip phone that meowed was my workhorse during my texting boon. i got to the point where i could text a whole message without even looking, my thumb+brain team knowing not only the location of each key and what letters where on it, but what words would come up on the predictive text and how many times i would need to scroll through for a particular word. sadly, the phone's sim card only held 50 messages and i would have to delete it every night. i began keeping a notebook of my favorite texts, since they were so transitory.

for my xxxth birthday, i got a mytouch, t-mobile's iphone. i can't text blindly anymore, but it does hold a lot more text messages. i'm not sure how many, because i've currently got 8,318 since i last cleared it on october 5. as my messaging program has been getting sluggish, i think it's time to clear it out, and i thought it would be interesting to look at the numbers:

my top five text friends:

1. jaime (no surprise): 2,033
2. mark: 1,161
3. kristin: 659
4. t: 639
5. brooke: 553

jaime and i not only text the most, but also the longest. it's nice that we're both on t-mobile, since we can send longer texts, which is an advantage, as we usually talk about life, the color blue, philosophy, the occasional dating frustration, and everything else under the sun.

mark and i are usually much briefer, arranging where to eat, when to play rock band, exchanging random awesomeness we see throughout the day, and the occasional dating frustrations.

with kristin, they're mostly warm fuzzies. it's nice to have plenty of those on hand.

tim is even shorter than mark. often they're 3-5 words to coordinate who's driving and where to meet, but we do a lot together and it adds up. in between that is a good amount of dry humor, again of odd and bemusing things that happen to us. i find myself laughing as i browse through them.

brooke is a hodgepodge, ranging from coordinating events (movie night, harry potter book club, office night, et al.) to friendly chit chat about whatever's going on at the moment.

in short, 61% of all of my test messages comes from those five people. jaime alone has 24% of the total.

looking through these as i'm about to delete them, i'm wishing i could export them to a text file somehow. at least i've still got my notebook.

editor's note: turns out i'm not the only one who wants to save text messages. a google search and a flip through the "mytouch" magazine i got in the mail a few days ago both offer a handful of programs to download text messages from phone to computer.