Fun with Texts, Pt. 2

I saw this thing on Facebook a few months ago that celebrated the fact that many people have made friends in various social networking avenues with people they’ve never actually met in person. This is overwhelmingly true for me in the Open Group for Bedlam Farm, a group solely devoted to creativity. One of my best “friends” there is a woman named Lisa and she has an absolutely fantastic blog called Just Ponderin’ in which she examines all facets of her personal life, from her family to her dogs and on and on. You can get to the blog by going to the left hand side of this page and clicking on the link under Blogs I Follow. And she’s really, really funny. Full disclosure: I stole the title Fun with Texts from her (you can read her contributions to the subject here) and as I seem to be posting more and more about my own experiences with text messaging, I should probably come up with my own title. I thought about it and haven’t come up with much. There’s just not much you can do with the word “text.” I thought about “Text-book Examples” or maybe “I Wanna Text You Up.” Not really catchy category titles, so I’m just gonna go with Text Ed. See? That’s not really catchy either, but anti-thievery is one of the laws of writing and I can’t outright permanently steal Lisa’s. So Text Ed it is.

So the second post in this fledgling category has actually turned out to be a part 2. I didn’t intend it to be, but you will see why it became such. See, many months ago, I posted about the many things that I see in my job pushing wheelchairs at Eppley Airfield. One of those things is the horrible brain child of someone looking to capitalize on the “Yea!!! A celebrity knows our town exists!” mind-set that spawned the “Omaha! Omaha!” T-shirt. If you don’t know about this, click here.

When I saw the shirt, my first and only thought was “Fantastic. All we need is one person wearing this shirt anywhere outside of Omaha to completely buttress the stereotype that Nebraska is just a bunch of bumpkin hicks.” I didn’t even consider that there might be a market for the shirts in the children demographic. I was wrong. Check this out:

Her friend Martha wanted a shirt for her grandson, a Denver Broncos fan. And while no one but me and the clerk would actually see me buy the shirt, you can imagine my chagrin at even this prospect and I told her so.

She had a point there. I mean I do owe this woman, at least partially, my life. Like, a couple thousand times over. So I agreed. Grudgingly.

Unaware at this point if she had read either the post about the shirt or the Fun with Texts Part. 1, I warned her of the possible ramifications (I also ignored the glaring error in light of my giddiness).

Turns out, she had read Part 1.