Emoticons Are Threatening to Consume Us All

So, bottom line, I am not a teenage girl. As such, I do not have many teenage girl tendencies. Yes, I did say ‘many’, instead of, oh say, ‘absolutely none whatsoever, just what are you insinuating?’ But thankfully the sources of my teenage girlishness are becoming less and less dominated by teenage girls themselves.

For you see, I am a huge fan of Justin Bieber.

Psych! I happen to spend a decent amount of time on Facebook, particularly using the instant messaging feature, and I have started texting quite a bit within the last year. While navigating through the typing jungle, I have encountered a few intelligence crushing pythons along the way. Along side horrendously poor spelling and increasingly baffling abbreviations, I have grappled with emoticons.

Oh emoticons! I guess I don’t have as big a beef against them as the title blatantly states. However, on the days where I question my masculinity, I look at myself in the mirror and firmly state, ‘At least I don’t use emoticons.’ Except for when I typed some punctuation marks together on Facebook and it actually turned into a face with it’s tongue sticking out (oddly enough, I would have been okay if it hadn’t transformed). The only way to fully recover from that was to kill a bear with an ax.

So I started to create my own emoticons. Not images necessarily; I just type out something outrageous and confusing. Most of them are meant to indicate happiness, but some do refer to disappointment. So the rest of this post is dedicated to own special brand of emoticons. Some I have used before, some I’m creating right now.

Emoticons of Happiness

-A squirrel using a deep fryer

- A possum with a mullet

-A bear holding a shotgun

-A flamingo in overalls

-A dog in a sombrero

-An old man carving a wooden spoon out of a slightly larger wooden spoon

-Carrot Top falling down an escalator

-A chimp hitting a kangaroo with a folding chair

Emoticons of Negativity

-A dying skunk watching ‘Battlefield Earth’

-A clown with a lazy eye and a straight razor

-Your eighth grade health teacher

-A Wal-Mart greeter with diarrhea

So okay, I like to have some sort of point to my posts, other than just being goofy. Well most of the time, anyway. Those two posts about ways to feel young contained -48% helpful information. But I guess if there was anything of actual lasting value that I would like to add to this, I would ask, no implore, everyone to quit using so many flipping smiley faces, learn to spell the words properly, and quit creating abbreviations- I mean abbrevs.

I am fairly convinced that this kind of behavior is either making us dumber as a nation or proving how dumb we’ve become. I know this because I have seen people sign notes with ‘laters’ instead of sincerely. So please, please, please, learn to spell. And don’t use all those smiley faces. Unless you are in fact an 8 year old girl. But even then you should probably know better.