communication 101

Well, as bad as I am at blogging, we can all take comfort in the knowledge that in fact that I am actually worse at many things. Last week that thing was text messaging in Chinese. Now, I can't really write very well, but using a computer or phone I can often get by by typing in the sounds of the words I can speak and picking the correct character out of a group. Often this is a decent way to communicate 'cause I get enough time to understand everything that's being said. However, sometimes this whole process can go awry, as in the case of homophones... Last week I was talking (texting) with a friend about the weather and wanted to say something along the lines of "I hope you're comfortable" which sounds something like wo xi wan ni hen shu fu (wo xiang ni hen shu fu might also be ok), unfortunately thanks to a combination of couple of wrong characters (even though they are spoken the same) I ended up with a sentence meaning "I miss you, uncle" and uncle here meaning either father's younger brother or, in slang, an older man taking care of a younger woman in any variety of ways. So, even if this post was rambling, unintelligible, and used way too many parentheses and commas, at least I didn't accidently hit on you and suggest that "I'm your daddy".