An Audience of Two
Sometimes the people I write silly letters to are foolish enough to respond to me. They do this for a variety of reasons including being ‘nice,’ finding me ‘interesting,’ and writing ‘cease and desist’ letters.
That’s usually the part I look forward to. (Not the cease and desist letters– although that is fun–, just people writing back.) You see, after most correspondence, the previous messages between the two writers is included.
Example:
2: dancing LOL
1: What r u doin’????
2: Come chill with me at the club. is FUN!!!1!! OMG
I’d clean that up, but that’s really what messages between people really look like: yucky.
It’s so yucky, in fact, that most people just skip past it, thinking they already read it. This is where my anti-socialness and constant need to write to entertain myself pays off.
Whenever I start to notice that the tail-end of a conversation has become rather lengthy (hereby defined as messages averaging 40+ kb), I start to tweak it just to see if anyone will notice.
Example:
2: dancing LOL
1: What r u doin’????
2: I ate a big sub and it gave me gas. How FUN!!1! OMG
The trick is to keep the length and end of the messages about the same.
I first started it as a way of sneaking messages to people in the hopes that once we stopped talking (as inevitably happens), they would eventually peruse an e-mail or two — and rather than read each e-mail individually, they’d read the attached “original messages” — and get my hidden notes. This would cause them to check every e-mail I ever wrote to them, and, in reading them, they would just laugh and laugh…
This has never happened. In fact, nobody has ever realized that the messages I forward are never the same messages twice.
I’ve probably written a novel’s worth of unread messages now, but I’m not going to stop. It’s just so much fun to write things that nobody will ever see. I feel like the writers for the Daytime Emmys.
(p.s. Don’t check your e-mail. I did it to everyone but you 🙂
Sometimes the people I write silly letters to are foolish enough to respond to me. They do this for a variety of reasons including being ‘nice,’ finding me ‘interesting,’ and writing ‘cease and desist’ letters. That’s usually the part I look forward to. (Not the cease and desist letters– although that is fun–, just people…