Enough with the hearts & kisses signoffs already

I wish I had the courage to resist the overwhelming pressure to respond in kind to my women friends who sign off their messages with love hearts, flowers and cute kittens

And I'd love to have the courage to keep my business correspondence brief and to the point, to cut out all fake expressions of concern for the health of my creditors, and to stop worrying about what kind of "Regards" I should send. Because I can spend more time trying to figure that out than on the actual contents (see my earlier rant, Keep Calm and Carry on,  Regardless) 

Hell, it took me years to realise that you are not expected to actually feel what you say when you are being polite, and that when people ask "How are you?", the correct response is "Fine, thanks, and you?" and not a litany of everything that has gone wrong in your life in the past week. 

 https://www.wired.com/story/sustainable-
software-design-climate-change/

So, while fossicking around in the library today I came across this piece in Wired Magazine, and it might just give me the excuse I've been waiting for!

Did you know that if every adult in the UK sent one less "thank you" letter, it would cut 16 tonns of carbon per year ? See Wired ->

I’m stunned! 

Who knew that emails used so much carbon????????

The fact is that I am a nice, kind, caring person, but I don't know how to mimic myself in prose

I’m going to reveal the fact that for a whole lot of reasons listed below,  I don’t know how to write letters full of feminine niceness,
or even polite business correspondence

• NESB background
• with autistic mother who didn’t know how to do it either and was always floridly OTT with salutations straight from the 19th century Austro-Hungarian Imperial etiquette book
• a father who was never able to learn English,
• Didnt do business studies at school
• never got into dolls, hearts, flowers, 
• was never a popular girl but a nerd,

The fact is that women have a whole extra layer of social policing of behaviour that we must adhere to and monitor. 

And then there is: 

• signing off as Jx (the x’s at the end of my sign off came after years of duress and resistance) 
• I don’t like to hug or social kiss and its not because of sensory hypersensitivities. It is because it is
• dishonest to hug or kiss anyone you don’t really love let alone liek 
• a marker of status, where the popular people hug each other and the rest of us feel humiliated
• and sometimes NTs who love to hug and social kiss don't like Autistics