{Editor's note: Of course this is about me. This whole blog is about me.}

It started with texts. She held off for a long time, preferring not to pay, preferring email and keyboards, so much easier, especially since she typed more than 80 words per minute, maybe more. (Who knows? It had been over 15 years since her last typing test.) She typed so fast she could drip clauses into sentences the way chefs drizzled cherry sauce over cheesecake.

Texts were, by nature, short. Disturbingly short. Leaving off the niceties of language. She did not approve.

Then came text language. Even when she had to painstakingly punch numbers on her phone's keypad three or four times each to use capital letters and punctuation when the rest of the world referred to her as "U," she still composed complete sentences on principle.

And she noticed something happening. Her insistence on punctuation grew increasingly desperate, as if were she not to end a salutation in an exclamation point the recipient might not read her missive. Everything! Became! Exciting! Or enthusiastic? She didn't know. She just stopped using periods.

She cried the night Facebook stickers appeared, although she embraced emojis with her sister and daughter because they became another form of family language, where chickens meant things are good and cats whistling whispered the mood in the room had turned awkward. She could only accept the substitution of pictures for words if there wasn't a word that meant quite that thing. For everything else? Enthusiastic punctuation.

She didn't even notice she was doing it until she reread a work email to find only one period in a paragraph of six sentences. A paragraph about email newsletters. The email newsletters were not putting out forest fires or rescuing babies. They were just showing up innocuously in people's inboxes, saying hey. Surely there was no need for that much exclamation in such an email?

That was the day she stared at her correspondence, at the mix of frantic punctuation and pixelated turtles that would've been borderline crazy talk in 1999 and threw up her hands. Then she began rereading every email to make sure she was using periods. Because really, she ruminated, most of work talk only requires periods. Unless one is a brain surgeon, but even then, she thought, one might become desensitized to the idea of cutting open skulls and removing things found inside.

As she consciously worked to edit out the unnecessary enthusiasm, she found herself channeling her thesis adviser, whose complete lack of enthusiasm for most things revealed itself to be an extremely dry sense of humor, and she appreciated getting her own jokes. Playing this game with herself was almost as much fun as unsubscribing from PR firms' media lists, and she rode the inside joke with every comma as she attempted to rid her writing of so much unnecessary hype.