Shrthnd iz da Nu Amrcn Englsh

OMG.
STFU.
LMAO.
KMSL.
WTF.
TTYL.
LOL.
WYD.

OK. Seriously? I am getting so upset with everyone short handing everything. What happened to simply writing in a normal way? We learned it in school and had no problem at that time but why is it when we get on the internet or write a text or email, all of our coveted writing skills go out of the window? I'm sure that none of the vast majority want to become stenographers so I feel we should cool it with the shorthand and use it only in necessary situation. It gets quite annoying when you are reading a text message and you see no true words but just bunched up letters.

A friend of mine sent me a text message saying: "Hey. WYD? I'm KMSL at UToob. Like WTF? LoL!" Of course it was early Saturday morning when I got the text message so I was a little disoriented and at first thought it was a dream and I was on another planet because I couldn't make out anything that was written. Once I was able to discern what was written, my next thought was who watches Youtube on a Saturday morning? Are there no cartoons for people to watch anymore and why are you even texting me this? I was so frustrated, I didn't respond.

This shorthand stuff also can be confusing to those who weren't born into it. Take for instance my godmother. She is in her mid-60's and still has a flip phone with no internet and 450 minutes allotted per month. She got a text message saying that one of her distant cousins had passed away. Obviously feeling a since of remorse and a want to comfort the individuals on the other end of the phone since she couldn't physically be there, she sent a reply text saying "LOL." When she told me this, I literally choked on my food. I explained to her that LOL was not something that you say in a situation of anguish, sadness, or pain. She responded that she saw it on a greeting card and thought it meant "Lots of Love" so she sent LOL in the text. I was further agitated with the fact that, she, someone who grew up having to write on parchment paper with quills (joking) would have such difficulty calling them or sending a text with real words to show how she felt and to express condolences.

I've been a guilty party in this as well but not to the extent of my messages coming out looking like secret codes but on occasion I may type the ever popular and thrifty LOL or OMG. I never take it to the extremes of using it all the time and in every facet of my life.

I'm taking this interpersonal communication course for school and we have a discussion forum where we talk about different forms of communication and how it affects us personally and when we dialogue with someone else. The moderator of the form was explicitly clear in ensuring there are no grammatical, tense, or punctuation errors being we are college students (studying to earn a Master's degree or a second degree) and we are mature enough to write in a professional and concise manner. The subject was about perception and how we perceive people, institutions of laws, or even personalities. I wrote my post and got some replies from others who either disagreed or agreed for different reasons. One reply really stuck out and though I will not cite it or include the full text, you will get an idea of why we should decipher the correct times to use short hand:


                     "Ur post on perception wuz gud but I thnk that u should not take it srsly LoL. BTW, if you thnk about how it wud have been bck then u wud realize that ppl are not the same LOL. When I first red ur post I wuz liiiiike WTF but I understnd na. Lol."

This was only part of a two paragraph reply that struck me more as elementary. I thought at first that some of the words were typos but when I realized that every word was spelled the same way, I knew it was because they were taking shortcuts. This baffled me because the professor set clear guidelines and expectations about this. They complained to the professor that this was their thoughts and thoughts can't be graded.

One can only think how this is going to progress. I've seen shorthand on resumes and on research papers that I have proofread for my peers. I just don't understand how people don't realize how big of an injustice they are doing to themselves and to the reader and moreover to the content of the text. We were taught to understand words in their whole form and to utilize them as such in order to have deep, profound, and efficacious communication. I'm not saying that our form of written communication shouldn't change and grow, I'm simply saying that the several forms should be used in their respective venues. 

I feel that it is necessary to teach the youth about the importance of this. They are the ones who are utilizing text messaging more heavily and defining it as their first line of communication aside from direct face to face communication. Our goal should not be to stop the use of shorthand, but to educate on the proper use of it.
One thing is for sure, I'll never look at LOL the same again. Lol.

I wanted to end this post with a bang so here it is... BANG.

Pop the Molly, You'll Die...Maybe.

Trinidad James: I stopped fu***** with Mary today and it sucks

(f***) but there's a new girl in the neighborhood, you can call her Molly

Trinidad James: Pop the Molly I'm sweatin', woo!

Rick Ross: Put Molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it

I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain't even know it

Kanye West: Something about Mary, she gone off that Molly

Tyga: And I can't seem to findMolly, Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly

Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly

These are just a few of the lyrics that have created and glorified Molly, a seemingly harmless and trendy drug that is all the rage among the hip-hop front runners, adults, and kids alike. It's mere presence in pop culture has left a very bad taste in the mouths of many, literally.

I came across this today as I was watching the morning news. I had just came back from my morning run and decided to turn on the tube. The first thing I see and hear is about Molly. Now I am not oblivious, I have heard the name before but I honestly felt that it was just a passing trend of some new alcohol or some stripper turned celebrity. As the newscast pointed out people, especially children, die from this drug. I listen to rap, but not the kind of rap that objectifies women, glorifies drugs and alcohol, or impresses upon someone to be angry and fight just for the sake of doing it. 

There were 3 or more children (between 16-20) that died this weekend from this drug. Add that number to a staggering 5-10 individuals per month since the inception of Molly. Those numbers are just the ones that are reported to news agencies. There was an 18 year old girl who was in rehab, as the story pointed out this morning, to kick an addiction from Molly. 18 years old? You should still be popping Flintstone vitamins, not Molly. This goes to show you that it's important to know what is going on in kids' lives and not only that, parents need to constantly and OPENLY talk to them about outside influences, health factors from smoking, alcohol, and other recreational drugs, and making informed decisions as young adults.

This ever present Molly is actually MDMA, the purest form and successor to the drug Ecstasy. There are no fillers, which is why it's so easy to overdose from it. Many college students and even high school students sell and use the drugs and it is really popular at parties, private gatherings, concerts, and music festivals dedicated exclusively to the bite sized capsule. Put it this way, if there was Molly at the original Wood Stock, I'm more than sure that many of us would not be here today. I shuddered to think that this stuff is being sold at school campuses and my own niece who is high school came to mind. Had she been asked about it? Had she been told false information about how wonderful it is? Had she taken it? These days, there is very little peer pressure for drugs, sex, and alcohol because, thanks to rap and pop culture, it's what is cool and we all know it's about being cool or at least perceived as being cool in high school! Because Molly is embraced by many popular artists, the only pressure is felt by those who are trying to stop a seemingly addictive trend of epic proportions and cut down on its popularity. To make things worse, the pill isn't just a pill anymore. Sellers have gotten innovative and have started putting the powder in candy and even crystal form.

I don't know about you, but you might want to make sure that the Jolly Rancher you are eating, is in fact JOLLY and not MOLLY. It's so crazy to me that something like this is being promoted and glorified as it is. A couple of days ago, I was at a gas station one day getting some snacks and heard two young men with a little boy of about 7 or 8 talking about getting Molly. I was surprised to hear them talking about this in such detail, but I was just flabbergasted at the fact they were discussing this with such a young child with them. They planned to go and get some Molly after they left the store. They cracked a joke about selling "the little boy in case they didn't have enough dough." Really?

Needless to say I did turn around and gave them the worst glare that I could muster up in the little time I had in the checkout line (I didn't care if I got shot) and I had to say a little prayer when I got in the car because I was madder than a mosquito in a mannequin factory. 

When will this end? The constant uprising of new, dangerous, and "hip" drugs? I suppose the correct question to ask is why are we allowing this to even begin? We have a responsibility to those that we care for to ensure that they are not put in harms way and don't fall victim to wolves in sheep's clothing. Everything that does glitter isn't gold; I know: cliche, cliche, cliche. However, everything that is gold doesn't glitter either. What we must enforce and reinforce is that everything good to you isn't good for you. We must create value in the things that are positive, fruitful, and admirable and expose those that we care for, specifically the youth, to those things in order for them to stray away from those things that are malevolent, damaging, and deadly.

All in all, we need to crack down on who and what influences children. My mommy always said that the worst thing you can do is be an enabler to your children. They equate that to you being their friend. You need to be the parent and you need to right the wrongs in your children's lives whether they like it or not. You never stop being a parent, so that means you don't stop listening, disciplining, inspiring, and setting examples. You're children don't need to be like you, they need to be better than you. In life, you only get one shot if you aren't a parent. If you are then you get as many shots for as many children you bring into the world. They are to become better versions of you, so raise them to be so. They are your second chance to right what went wrong in your youth.

Rappers who promote Molly and make it sound so amazingly wonderful that you just can't help yourself from trying to find Molly and allow "her" to further tempt you into being a part of a moment of nostalgia and pleasure, should be shunned for this. This is a craze that once found, leaves you feeling lost. Molly is definitely not the "girl next door" that you may think. She is a clever and tawdry little pawn in the game of quick money and long term suffering. I don't remember ever being influenced by anything or anyone negative in my life or I just may not recall because the positive forces in my life kept my focus where it needed to be--in my books and in church. These days, everything is connected--to the internet. Therefore, you know longer need encyclopedias and thesauruses because everything can be found, bought, sold, and saved online. This is great until it starts becoming abused or misused. What can we do about this? Get your arses off of Facebook and put your child's face in a book. Cutting off ties with the connected world and instilling the values and bonds that are necessary to avoid Molly are within you and your family; it's in the household. 

The battle is never over because just like this started, it shall end and before you know it Molly will be "Audi 5000" and the self-proclaimed Sarah may take her place. Nonetheless, it's time for a real life Hunger Games to ensue and we need to be gunning for Molly's head.

I wanted to end this post with a bang, so here it is... BANG.

Being Country in the City

With the craze of shows like Duck Dynasty and Swamp People, you can' t help but fall in love with the "down home," vivid, and over dramatized characters that make the show. They make you exclaim, "they are not serious!" The crazy thing is, that's how it is in the south. Being a country boy, I can't tell you how fun it was to run barefoot in the rain, make mud pies, stand in the big ditches and catch tadpoles, climb the pecan trees, eat crawfish and shrimp until I burst, and camp out in our big backyard. People who grow up in the south, more precisely country towns, have a natural affinity to nature and animals. It's much more comforting to be outside doing something and enjoying your land rather than inside watching the tube all day. Many country towns are living museums in their own right. They create backdrop of what once was innovation in our society. At one time they were at the forefront of modernism.

This was our idea of fun. There was such a simplistic view of things back at home in the country living the country life. All those memories culminated into a mental buffet that will keep me full until I take my last breath. I can't imagine how I would be if I didn't have such a carefree upbringing! My grandfather had a farm that had every animal. Chasing the chickens, being chased by the geese, running with the cows, running from the bulls,and of course trying to catch rabbits! When we got hungry, there was no McDonald's because we had a farm "E I E I O." We ate off of the land that we tilled. 

As I got older, I realized that I stopped having that fun. I no longer sat outside and looked at the clear night sky with its never ending stars twinkling within it. I didn't want to drink fresh made lemonade on the porch in the rocking chair in the summer. I didn't want to run around the big magnolia trees smelling the sweetly scented petals that adorned the grown below it. I just wanted to do what everyone else did and surround myself with television, electronics, and the internet. It seemed that as my youth and innocence began to disappear, so did my high regard for country living.

Once I got into college, I tried to stay away from my hometown as much as I could. I would shudder when people asked where I was from because for some reason, in school, people thought that folk from country towns didn't know how to conduct themselves in big cities or get along with city folk because thy weren't necessarily the "sharpest tools in the shed." I realize now that I could easily prove them wrong by telling them that a well-versed and well-cultured individual like myself was born and raised in a country town. I always considered myself well-cultured because my mother ensured that I was exposed to a myriad of things in life--her goal for my siblings and me were to be cultural chameleons. Nonetheless, telling your peers you were from a small "town" with a population less than that of the university you were attending was a bit embarrassing. Then you would hear the incessant jokes about in-breeding, one toothed, fast talking inhabitants and I was none the impressed with it.

I live in a big city now: Houston, TX which is still in the south and has a rich heritage of cowboys, rangers, and trail rides in its own right but has grown to envelop that culture along the others that have sought home within its boundaries. The most diverse city, the New York of the South, is one that I call home now. I've only been here a year and my slight "twang" still hasn't faded so the natives can point me out like a watermelon in a cherry patch. It's okay now, however. Being from the country is "sexy" and "cute" and people just love country folk these days. They want to know the recipes, the line dances, and of course they want to party with the best of them. I've learned to embrace where I'm from; those were my humble beginnings which gave way to a confident present where instead of shunning who I was, I praise what where I'm from taught me. The stories I have are the best entertainment for my friends who are city folk.

They encompass many different cultures and creeds and we can share so much of ourselves by enlightening one another on where we come from. Of course you have to get used to not drinking liquor in unopened containers on the street, popping fireworks in many residential areas, not violating the noise ordinance because of the domino and card games, and of course not having that "authentic" good food that you were brought up on. When I think of home, I think of Steel Magnolias with much stronger accents and a less regard for fashion but everyone sticks togethers, loves each other, and wants to simply live a happy life.

Here in the city, it's about staying fit, staying connected, staying successful, and staying in the know while back at home it's about making it to the Bingo hall on time on Tuesdays to get a good seat. Still, I am enjoying what I am learning and seeing here. This experience lets me know that there is much more out there and keeps me focused on being a part of it. I know now that it's true that you can be country in the city,however you can't really be city in the country--weird huh? 

The next time you want to take a vacation, DON'T think big, think country: go to a small town and truly relax. Enjoy the fresh air, southern hospitality, the splendor of simplicity, the good eating and plentiful drinking. You won't be disappointed and the worst thing that could happen to you is that you have fun doing something and being somewhere you haven't been before. Paris, Tokyo, Milan, and Rome will always be there when you get back.

I wanted to end this post with a bang so here it goes... BANG.