I know I’m late to this party, but a friend of mine just showed me how to download an emoji app. I guess I never realized you had to download a separate application to express yourself in ice skates and balls of fire.
I always assumed that my iPhone had an incomplete form of Siri, a kind that only expressed herself in autocorrected words I never meant to say.
My Siri didn’t have animated sunglasses or smiley-faces with teeth. She couldn’t even get my name right (“Belah?” “Beach?” “Beech?”).
I applied Christian principles to Siri, which meant that I was mercifully nice to her and prayed for patience when she autocorrected messages to my mother.
My mom would reply, “Honey, I don’t get it.”
And I didn’t get it either. I never understood why “thing” would autocorrect to “thong.”
It was just inconsiderate.
Siri and I eventually learned to work together. I texted faces like this: : ) and wrote out the words “shooting star!” or “jubilation!”
Sometimes I expressed emojis by taking pictures of my expressive face, but this resulted in a massive photo album of unflattering selfies. This became embarrassing when our computer screen saver displayed a cycling photo stream of my documented emotion.
It made houseguests uncomfortable.
As with most apps, I downloaded the emoji app to solve my most distressing first-world problems.
When I acquired this new emotional archive, I briefly wondered if my blog should change from text to animation, if I should transform it into an emoticon flipbook that would make my life will look more like a Pixar movie.
But as I thought about this, I realized that I just wrote 350 words about a wordless function. I just crushed the whole point of emoticons.
I think this means that I am an over communicator, the kind that talks all day, goes home and chats with my husband, then blogs late into the night because I still have words leftover. I’m not in the business of consolidating words, but in using them, overusing them, and throwing them around like flammable confetti.
Maybe I don’t need emojis after all.
But in an effort to avoid sounding too old school, to make me seem trendy and hip, but also relevant-without- trying, I’ve come up with a solution.
I’ll continue to write using only words, but I will do it while wearing 3D glasses.
You should probably consider wearing them, too.
It will be like we’re connecting on a whole new level, since our communication is so rich it cannot be contained to two dimensions.
It will seem really cool without making any sense at all.
First world problem=solved.
🙂