“I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.” (Reprise)
I get this itch to write whenever something is troubling me, though not actually to write about the situation which is imposing on my contentment.
So, while I organize those thoughts before indirectly purging them onto this blog, I would like to return to the topic of drunk-texting. In the past week, I have discovered two ways around this illness. The first is a sort of medication, the second, a cure.
- Use your international keyboards. (This may only be available to iPhone users, but if you think it may help you with your ailment, I recommend contacting your cell phone provider or user’s manual.) On your iPhone, go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> International Keyboards. Choose a language with different characters than those on the English keyboard, like Macedonian or Thai. Slide from the “off” position to the “on” position. Now, return to your home screen and open a new text message. On the bottom of your keyboard, between the “123” button and the space bar, you will see a button with a globe on it. Pressing this button will allow you to flip through whichever international keyboards you have activated. When you get the urge to drunk-text someone, simply type nonsense in another language. That way, you can’t say anything specific that you may regret the next day. After testing this with friends, we learned that some non-iPhone users are unable to receive these foreign messages, while all iPhone users (even if they do not have their international keyboards activated) will receive the texts. Either way, you’re saving face.
- Delete certain contacts from your phone. Before exercising this method, I suggest that you either write down the contact’s phone number and leave it at home, or be sure that a friend has it in case of a (sober) emergency. Then, delete the person from your phone that, for whatever reasons, you do not think you should be drunk-texting. Be sure to also remove from your phone any previous text correspondence, or else drunk-you might find the unlabeled phone number and begin texting. I find this to be the more successful but unfortunately the more difficult of the two options presented here. However, when considering friendship, dating, and love, I am starting to think that if you feel you shouldn’t be drunk-texting someone, maybe you shouldn’t be texting him/her at all.