A Simple Text Message.

This week, my best friend had a dilemma. A dilemma? How does a dilemma involve rhetoric?

Well. Let's view the situation here. The boy she "likes" invited her over to his place to hang out, she's sort unable to do this at the moment due to a previous obligation, mainly homework and her Ben & Jerry and chick flick night. His text consisted of a basic: wanna hang out later? Or something along those lines.

She did. Trust me, she did. But she was restricted due to the um obligations. SO here's the dilemma:

How do you construct a text that says I want to, but I can't, but at the same time i dont care if you hang out with another girl, but yet know that you should ask me another time?

My response was that she was overthinking this message and she should just send "I can't tonight, but some other time. Sorry :(." But she was afraid that this would make it seem like she was blowing him off.

But how much information is too much information? How is it even possible to construct a message that can't be taken more than one way, but isn't too in depth? What is flirtascious, yet casually turning him down?

Oh the power of rhetoric, making words have a desired, or undesired effect.

Well after discarding the message "I can't because I'm having a chick flick night and doing homework, but you should hang out with someone else. Unless you want to hang out later?" I mean it got the message across, but does it sound needy? Does it sound like the message is trying too hard? Or should I add a frowy face? Or should I say something along the liines of a raincheck? Honestly, I'm still sticking with my original text that was to the point. But eventually we came up with:

"Yeah I would, but I can't exactly because I have homework, so you should hit someone else up".

Then came the waiting, while waitng she was reminded of this:

Just the first 30 seconds or so.

But what I'm attempting to get at in this story is that words, when not spoken, can have a whole other meaning, a meanig that wasn't desired. Trying to convince someone one things can be misconstrued, or a message that you thought was clear, might be confusing to someone else. Choose your words wisely, or choose you non-response wisely or you may end up like Dumbledore.

But maybe you shouldn't stress over simple messages like this too much, they're not really THAT big of a deal. Focus more on life altering speeches, like your motivational speech!