Last Text of the Day: Maintenance Post

The idea for this series came about when I was texting with my husband a few months ago. I believe that either the first or a new trailer had just come out for “The Force Awakens” and we were talking about that. After sending him a rather long text about Adam Driver’s role in the film, I thought to myself, “Oh my God, I’m such a nerd. What if that’s the last text I ever send?”

Amused, I decided to keep track of the last text I send every day and to review them after a month or two, to see if I could even remember what I was talking about.

As the months passed, however, I grew ambivalent about the project. I now worry that there’s too much navel-gazing involved here. Therefore, I’ve put off posting the project for a while. While I’m still ambivalent, I decided to proceed. If my readers don’t find it interesting, or if I continue to feel uncomfortable with it, I will discontinue it.

Firstly, here were the rules I set for myself about the project:

1. No sending any end-of-day “funny/good” texts in order to make my texting seem more interesting.
2. No NOT sending a text just because I think the one I sent before it is funny/better.
3. No posting any texts that are about someone else’s personal issues. Fortunately, this hasn’t come up.
4. No posting sexts. This also hasn’t come up because my husband and I don’t sext, but just in case.
5. All names used in-text will be redacted.

Secondly, I’m feeling very concerned about privacy. Originally, I was going to refer to my textees by their initials but eventually decided that an enterprising snoop could still figure out who they were. Instead, I decided to assign each person a color (i.e. red, orange, etc.) name. This will be entirely random. That is to say, the color will not be indicative of anything about the person, such as hair color or favorite color or whatever. Exception: my husband, to whom I’m giving the designation Blue, because he loves blue.

When I started this project, I expected it to prove to me that my life is as boring/mundane as I think it is. I honestly thought nearly all of the texts would be to my husband, and that most of those would be thinks like “okay” and “here” (i.e., me coordinating picking him up from work). I also thought there would be a lot more days where I didn’t send any texts at all. What I discovered is that I text a lot, with a wide variety of people, and that our conversations cover a range of topics (although I do talk about soccer a lot).

It’s been an interesting experiment for me. I hope that you find it interesting as well!