I’m not a dedicated social media user. I have a LinkedIn account but use it only to keep tabs on a few professional contacts. No Instagram, no TikTok, and no other platform that I happen not to know about because I’m too old or not cool enough. I fiddle with Facebook, mostly as a lurker and tracking old friends, with the occasional shameless self-promotion to persuade someone, anyone, to buy one of my books.
But Snapchat, now that’s my thing. It’s easy: snap a photo, add an optional caption, and send it to a recipient. I’m an outlier with Snapchat. I have only one person I use it with—Julia. And today we hit a milestone that I maybe take too much pride in: 2,000 consecutive days of sending each other a Snap. For those of you counting, that’s about five and a half years.
The best thing about this Snap streak, the only thing that matters, is I have documentation proving my daughter and I have taken a moment out of our day, every day, to think of each other. Sometimes she snaps me first; other days I take the lead. Only a couple of times have either of us almost forgotten, which could have broken our streak.
Although an occasional landscape or another person gets in the photo, almost every Snap we send is a simple selfie: resting face, goofy face, candid face. Eyes forward, eyes rolled, eyes half closed. Looking good and looking tired. Adding effects (Bunny ears! Hair on fire!) or playing it straight (plain dad).
I don’t know how much longer our streak will last. We even talked about if we want to shut it down at 2,000 (we don’t). So we’ll keep going, see what happens, and every day I’ll have a moment of eternity because I’m thinking of Julia.
