Disclaimer: if you see a bunch of garbage characters in this post, it is because I am inserting some of my fave emojis and your browser *may* not support them [Internet Explorer, I’m looking at you].

Do you emoji? I certainly do! Backing up a bit, I remember when text messaging became a way to communicate with family and friends without the whole small-talk thing that happens on the phone. You know the drill:

Caller [with (apparently) nothing better to do]: “How are you?”

You [breaking your neck to get yourself, your two young children, and a bunch of related paraphernalia out the doggamn door when, “Moooom! A lizard is out of the cage!”]: “Do you have five hours?”

I HATE phone calls. I can still remember The Commander* saying that one of my brother’s friends used the telephone like a weapon. She merely meant that Donny Marble called umpteen billion times a day. But. And then there’s email, which is fine for some situations but you never know when [if?] the receiver is going to read your message, not to mention how wildly they might misinterpret it and boy oh boy have I had that happen to me. And then there is the whole issue of how easy it is to forward an email message to everyone on the earth plus a few gods and other entities.

Text messages? They work! They are not perfect. Sometimes if conversations get too complicated, we have to switch over to phone or email but that is a CHOICE! Somewhere along the line, everybody ended up with an iPhone and I started using emojis. I tend to use a rather small vocabulary of emojis. Like:

🐸 (me)

🐣🐭🐧 (a few people I text with some regularity). There’s a new emoji person but that’s not for public consumption 🐸.

Then there is the Error Aminal 🐗. Poor guy. He really isn’t such a bad aminal. Just that once he accidently got included on a text message with errors in it. Although he is permanently relegated to Bad Aminal status, we actually love him dearly.

I can’t really describe when I use the smiley poop 💩. Usually it’s when I have done or said a really stupid thing — too stupid for our beloved Error Aminal — or whatever is going on is so ridiculous that I have no words.

I use hearts! Usually these hearts 💜💛💚 but I’ve been branching out a bit recently with some of the fancier hearts [wink]. The hearts allow me to make sentences, like: 🐸💜[insert object emoji here]. And that allows me to tell people how much I love them without getting right up in their face and saying, “I love you”, over and over again ad infinitum ad nauseam, which the objects of my affection would HATE, as I did when my moom was still alive and told me over and over what a “wanted” child I was. I knew that and I did absolutely love her. But… Oh those last couple years were soooo hard…

I love to use other emojis sometimes. Usually on party occasions: 🍸🎂🎏👑, etc. And then there was the day I was eating pho for the first time (in Atlanta on a beautiful rainy grokkery-store Apple-store parking-lot-tour day) and I got to put the pho emoji on instagram 🍜. That was sooooo much fun! I know. It doesn’t take much.

We NEED a manatee emoji. Somebody please make a Snooty emoji!

I could go on and on about all of this but… Do you use emoji? And, if you do, which emojis do you use and how / why?

*The Commander, as I have blahgged about before, had an iPhone in her later years and was a champ about texting. In the last year or so, it was easier to text with her than to try to talk to her on the phone…

This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2015 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.