Midnight Mutterings | Emojis

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

I don’t love emojis. If this were a text, these sentences would be followed by six dancing broken hearts with sad eyes squirting fat tears. Later lines would possibly include a few piles of steaming poop, if I were feeling especially crude.. Ah, now I finally see the appeal. With emojis I don’t have to strain my aching brain trying to find words to express my poorly formed thoughts into words.

Decades ago I joined an online forum out of Nova Scotia for people (yes, there was one man) with breast cancer. There was a host, and several categories of comments, including medical, emotional, family issues, as those topics are foremost in any serious illness. And (my often favorite) off topic. There may have been some rules that kept things civil, but in general, posts were generally kind, helpful and sometimes funny. I especially appreciated the occasional humor that cropped up when it looked like a fight might erupt.

Most of the members were Canadian with lots of Americans and not a few Europeans. I don’t recall anyone from the Far East or Africa, which may have been because the forum was in English and the internet was too young for automatic translation. Politics didn’t come up much and the nearest thing to an outright schism almost occurred about gun rights with the Canadian and European women not quite believing American attitudes about guns. One woman from Florida was particularly adamant about the necessity of owning guns ‘and not just for shooting rats in the backyard.’ That brought my favorite response that was actually from another American from the Midwest: ‘Well, that means no surprise parties for Jean.’

Then there was the planning for an in person gathering and where should it be and would it be safe in America and should we bring our guns for safety? Denmark was the finally chosen destination and I was the only one from North America there. This may have been my favorite travel as after the gathering, I traveled alone up the coast of Norway on the Hurtigruten, across the Scandinavian Arctic to the Russian border and then hitchhiked down Samiland (formerly Lapland) in Northern Finland, which is the only place I’ve ever been where absolutely no one spoke English. After that I took a train and bus to Helsinki and back to London and home. What, you ask, does this have with Emojis? Well, on the Breast Cancer forum, one participant put a dancing banana at the end of every sentence. Which was wildly annoying, especially since none of the rest of us knew how to do it. I still don’t.

I think every time I see an emoji, I think about that dancing banana. And one more thing about the breast cancer forum: It was the only time I was in a group in which so many people died so quickly after I met them either online or after that gathering. Not so long after that, the forum disappeared into Facebook, lost its identity and died like so many of its participants.

I imagine there’s an emoji for that too. A breast with a halo and wings that flap?