In love with the em-dash.  

Punctuation obsessed. We all have that phase in life.

The writer in me came out not with my first job as a copywriter, but in junior high school - with a cool smooth white electronic thermal paper-fed electric Brother typewriter that i used to write with for the yearbook/ school paper/ english term-sheets/ science stuff, in my nerdy science high school. Even if it typed so silently - no noisy clanging of keys to carbon roll, and the messy switching of ink tape, and the visceral smell of the banged carbon transfer if you made carbon copies under the original white document. There is something to be said about my historical attraction, and leaning towards the minimalist lines and not the romance of the Underwood typewriters, that line the vintage book shoppes and go for (now) more than what my japanese one was worth. And so my obsession with the sleek design anatomises what technology, and high tech, are encased in and stood for. It can’t be high-tech unless it had sheen, and gloss, and a finer grade of shine.

And so, under closer examination, it was the gadget that made me love the content. Not necessarily discovering that years of love letters written on scented stationery, made by hand are not actually inferior to the body of content or the Me collective, as i’d like to call it - just because they weren’t inked in blue, and edited without crossing the words out, and written cleanly over. Barring the actual documents that it was for - isn’t all the purpose of all tech at this point, was to arise from the carbon-copied scent of midnight oil burning, the whirring of that electric typewriter stopping at every power shutdown in remote places we decide to write at, or even centrally in a very tech-disabled country. Or the swish that grabbed paper makes as you finish typing the last sentence, signifying actually making your deadline. This is the equivalent to what the punctuation mark makes. In real life.

We do a grinding halt. Full stop. We pause. Comma. We think or explain, colon or semi-colon. We say shut up. Exclamation point. Without the help of the punctuation mark, we are held captive in the non-emotive environment that is beyond the evolved typewriter - a blank space, that is now as the “interface” for all tech platforms, that place which actually processes the words, whether we upload on iPad, iPhone, scrawl or scribble with two-digits or from the typing of our quick-to-qwerty ten finger keyboard. This merely speeds things along - we are quick to download the MS Office suite, as we word process, and document, and evolve to little e-post its. All these places and spaces are a fraction of what the mind can extend to, and lend itself on. Our expressions do not waver with the crashing of a (knock on wood) server, or a computer being stolen, or people gagging your face. There will be ways in capturing your views, snaps, stomata samples (maybe not), and microscopic splices of experimental diode cross-wiring.

Sometimes because of, and in all the grandest of designs, we forget that the tech is the tool, and it’s the well-strung strand of thought of the person typing, that is the point. Punctuation-wise - a tiny em-dash symbolises that it conquers all punctuations, and conveniently used as in this case, to illustrate what exactly awaits the writer who never fails to miss the forest for the trees.