Laughing at the little things

I am the first person to admit that I’m kind of hitting middle age.

Sorry. Had to take a minute there.

Truth told? I’m definitely not the first person rushing to say I’m middle-aged. It’s a stupid term anyway. I need something better…but I got nothing. I’ll work on it, but I’m open to suggestions.

I don’t feel my age, but that’s not quite right either. I don’t feel the way I thought forty*cough*eight would feel. I thought I would feel old and I don’t.

At least not usually.

Occasionally life tosses me a moment that reminds me I’m not exactly a spring chicken anymore. I had one of those moments a couple of weeks ago.

Emoji vs. Emoticon

I was visiting my sister over the Easter weekend. My Sweet was working so I had gone by myself. I was having so much fun that I didn’t really call much to check in, but Easter morning I thought I would send a quick text to wish him a Happy Easter.

I will admit to being a lazy text-er. I love the cute little emojis, but to use them I have to switch back and forth between the keyboards (text to emoji) on my phone. I’m old enough to have learned the original emoji language using keyboard shortcuts. So rather than change the keyboard I just type things like :0 for a surprised face or >:( for an angry face. You get the idea. It’s old school, but for me it’s easier (you can read lazier, it’s true in this case).

I have a reasonable repertoire of this little emoticons I use when I’m too lazy to use the new-fangled ones. (I sound old when I used phrases like ‘new-fangled’ don’t I? I’ll stop.)

My Sweet does not, apparently, have the same repertoire. He likes options on his phone like predictive text (I don’t) and auto-correct (I don’t). So as a consequence he really only recognizes a couple of the old emoticons.

He sure didn’t know this one…

because he was puzzled by it. He read it to himself…”Happy Easter my love! Miss you less than three”

Reading it aloud still didn’t help, it still didn’t make sense. So he shrugged and sent me this…

And I read it out loud, “Hello honey I miss you greater than three”. And I laughed.

It wasn’t until a couple of days after I got home that we were driving somewhere and he made his confession.

“You know that thing you used in your text? With the three? I had to look it up to see what it meant. I knew it had to be something, but I had already sent you that text back.”

And we both laughed. And we both felt a little old because we think that while we’re not exactly tech-savvy we are at least tech-competent. And sometimes we are neither savvy or competent.

We might be getting older, but at least we can laugh about it.

Oh…and if your kids are old enough that spelling things out so they don’t understand you doesn’t work anymore, try texting with emoticons. That ought to confuse them.

Love and light and laughter to you all…  😀

Is it ironic at all that when I went to google an image of keyboard emoticons, the first search result that came up was from a site called www.seniorplanet.org? Their tagline says ‘aging with attitude. If you’re interested in learning the language of emoticon you can click on the link below, but I suspect it has gone the way of Esperanto – another useless language I once studied.

https://seniorplanet.org/how-can-i-make-smiley-faces-and-other-emoticons-with-my-keyboard/