Yael+B’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2017

It’s 10:07 PM, Wednesday night. I hear a buzz like noise erupt from underneath the piles of half crumpled papers that hold the notes I take during 3rd period. Searching through pages of unmemorized formulas, I reach to see what it could be and when I glance down at that taunting screen I see the dreaded pattern that comes about at the same time every night, a yellow icon followed by his name. You know him, not by name but by nature, he’s the one that prefers using his thumbs to communicate with you rather than his vocal cords, he’s the one that suggests that you two hang out sometime but seems to always be busy, I could go on but I have a story to tell. I proceed to hesitantly tap that unnerving red box to see the over used line that consists of two words “Im bored” missing an apostrophe between the letters I and M, these two words are followed by the two symbols that seem to be in every message he sends me, the semicolon and the parenthese. At least it isn’t the infamous “streak” snap, right? I decide to reply (wrong move yael, you know better) with a photograph depicting the piles of papers and the open binders with the non suggestive “too much homework lol”. Hoping that this sends the message in an almost subliminal way hoping he backs down and leaves me alone, but how dare I underestimate him. He is persistent, he is determined, he is “bored”, and I should know that bored him is horny him and horny him is overly pushy, doesn’t understand the word no him. But see, hindsight is always 20/20. On this less than average wednesday night, I let the naive side take over, something telling me that tonight’s the night he’s going to be the him you want him to be, the him you imagined him to be, tonight’s the night he’s going to ask where your parents are from not where your bra is from, but the optimism being held in my actions gets a crack in it deriving from his response, “cum over” I don't think I should go into how he misspelled the first word, and of course those words are accompanied by the haunting punctuation that does all of his work for him. I always like to believe that people can be just as ambitious in person as they are over text, at least I know I can be, but he doesn’t seem like the type. He’s the type I don’t want my daughter to ever have to peel off of her at a party, He’s the type I want the america I grow old in, to lack. He’s the type the founders of snapchat unknowingly enabled to exist. As this wednesday night encounter progresses, he uses his newly found creativity, bounces off the responses I give him to get this almost conversation in the direction of my lower half, but see little does he know my confidence is not a synonym for easy, me wearing low cut shirts doesn’t mean that I’ll show him anything more than that. This is where he gets frustrated because my response to “send pics ;)” isn’t the one he wanted because what I gave him was no response at all but like I said before, he is persistent, So he decides to show me more than I ever wanted to see, what he seems to miss is that I do not want to learn what color his boxers are, I want to learn pythagorean identities that I have been trying to learn for the past hour and a half. Most just brush off infamous “dick pics” as something that is normal and some how now socially acceptable, but as many of you know I am not like most, so I call him out, but not with his preferable method of thumbs tapping on a screen, but I wait until the next day. I used an asset he seems to lack, vocal cords. I tell him in person how his photographer’s eye if you will makes people perceive him and once I got through the civilized and rational part of my confrontation, I just had to throw in something that made him feel just as insecure as he made me feel, as I turn my back to walk away I thought I should inform him that in actuality, it’s not something he should be flaunting. And with that he is now off to be him to the next snapchat user in his recents. The America I want to grow old in, as conceited as it may sound, has a surplus of girls like me. Girls who know how to shut him down, girls who aren’t afraid of pissing him off by saying no, and girls who prefer using sounds they create themselves to get their point across rather than their thumbs to nervously send a picture they would never want their parents to see. Applications like snapchat have created a generation of cowards but hopefully skeeters mom from the help is right when she says “courage skips a generation” so let the generation that runs the america I am old in not to be skipped.