Saturday, March 28, 2015

My son is napping, and I am sitting here sipping Blue Moon beer trying to halfway watch a documentary on the great, misunderstood Sonny Liston. Unfortunately, my unfocused mind went back to earlier this week when I meant to write about the annoying usage of emoticons. The mind wants what it wants, so I will humor it.

Earlier in the week, one of my former co-workers hit me up on gchat, and let me know that she was on the prowl for a new job, and she was going to use me as a reference. I told her to I would be happy to oblige, but I needed her to send me both the description of this job and her latest resume. She didn't say "ok", "will do" or anything, she just sent me an thumbs-up emoticon which annoyed the shit out of me. You want to use me as a reference, which means at some point I will have to spend at least 10-15 minutes of my life talking about how great you are/were, but you don't think I'm worthy of words? That's no good, but she's not the only offender.

On a daily basis, I am subjected to smiley faces, thumbs, pictures of poo with smiley faces, HBD(instead of happy birthday), IJS (I'm just sayin'), and countless other abbreviations and emoticons. I brought this up to one friend of me, and she said to me, "Not everyone is an English major and good with words like you" but that's some lazy bullshit. English majors don't have a monopoly on words at all. In fact my three-year old son is perfectly capable of using the very words other people choose to truncate or animate via corny ass pictures. Words have sincerity and they show me you put some thought behind what you say to me. Hunting and pecking for emoticons does not make me feel special. And yes I expect people I am corresponding with to make me feel special to some degree. Don't judge me. Is that so wrong?

I have actually sat next to people who type "lol", when in fact they did not laugh, smile, smirk or even chuckle. They were as devoid of emotion as killer drones in Star Wars, but they misled the people they were chatting with into believing some laughter had taken place. As I am typing this, I realize that no one gives a good goddamn about this except me, so I will shut up now. I promise you people I am neither a snob nor an anal person, I just like a bit of structure, because without it, we will certainly have a Chinua Achebe situation on our hands, and no one wants that.

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