tolerance.

I get angry and frustrated over the smallest comments that were perhaps unnecessary, by making some of such comments myself. It made me look petty, grumpy and unapproachable, which adds fuel to the anger. There is a reason I dislike electronic communication, especially text messaging, email, SMS or whatsapp. With electronic communication, save for Skype and voice calls, you take away emotions that can be found in speech when a person speaks using his or her voice, not fingers tapping on a screen. Emotions get replaced by yellow emoticons or colons and brackets. Do they really tell you how the other person is feeling? Besides, with electronic communication, you can choose to ignore, and the other person is either left hanging high and dry and wondering what was said wrongly, or he chooses to ignore as well. You don't get that when you talk face to face, people can't avoid but have to show it all. Misunderstandings will happen less frequently as well, as what you hear is substantiated by what you see–body language.

This beautiful humanly aspect of us is slowly but surely eroding away. It is a pity. We have to pay a price for convenience. There remains a reason why I still write letters to people who really matter to me, I can't write to everyone because I don't have that much time to do so and would not make sense because I don't have so much to tell some people. Letters mean more than emails, especially if the other end of the correspondence is in another place far from where I am. The handwriting tells a lot about how much effort a person puts in to pen the letter and possibly shows some of the emotions as well. It takes some skill to properly write a letter too. If you have a piece of paper, how much of it are you going to fill up, how are you going to fold it, how are you going to divide it?

It's hard to tolerate, very very hard, especially on busy days that I keep getting bothered by these little annoyances when all I want is for everything to run smoothly.