death to an initialism.

lol. that little initialism is currently sitting on my mind, dangling its skinny legs over the edge somewhere near my temple and giving me a tension headache.

i've never used lol. from the start, i found it irksome. maybe i thought i was too cool for it. i'm not above thinking i'm too cool for things. (<—some of you will catch what i did there. that's because you too are occasionally too cool.) as i saw lol more and more, i started resenting its existence entirely, like i do the group nickelback. it was on facebook. in emails. soiling my text messages. people i loved used it: my friends. family. my boyfriend. the transmission of such an abhorrent term from the man in my life would inevitably propel me into an existential crisis over our relationship. when we finally broke up for the final time, he told me i had cellulite and that i looked like a meth head without makeup (did he mean a meth head not wearing makeup? do meth heads even wear makeup?). neither of these things were incorrect, by the way. i do have cellulite. but i still look good, gurl. and there was a time when i looked terrible without makeup: when i was a stressed out new mother raising an infant whose crying fits and sleeping habits were more indicative of ingesting red bull than breast milk. alas, i had broken this man's heart, many times over. so insults—both to my physical appearance and my personal lexicon—were his revenge.  fair enough lol. 

kill me. 
 
let's keep in mind what lol stands for: laughing out loud. some of you would have us believe your every move is lol-worthy. for example: "long day think i'm gonna rest now lol." no. unless you're resting with a mitch hedburg CD, you resting is not hilarious. also, not only are you not hilarious, you're not literate. use some punctuation. (yes, i'm admonishing lack of punctuation while typing in lowercase. it's a stylistic choice. or i'm too lazy to reach for the shift key.)

lol is not a period. so stop putting it at the end of every sentence. in fact, stop everything right now: stop and remember the last time you laughed out loud. appreciate that in that moment, nothing else mattered. see? laughing out loud is a precious state of being. it is rare and elusive, like unicorns and bridge trolls. each and every belly-borne gust that bursts free from your lips and forms the morpheme ha is a moment of transcendence. it is you rising beyond every crap thing that happened today or last week or this year. every time someone overuses lol, they're spitting in the face of nirvana. for shame.

so please, take care with lol. give reverence where it's due.