We like to stay home on the Fourth of July, as y’all know. I’m not superstitious per se, I just don’t want to be on the road. We could hear the fireworks all right (and all night), plus we had a fun pool party at our neighbors across the street. My friend Les suggested I read Anne Lamott’s opinion piece in the Washington Post about the Zen concept around chaos and confusion. When a lot of difficult things are happening all at the same time, Lamott reminds us that it means we have to protect something new that is about to be born.
I want to believe that something good is coming, and the Bug’s Bat Mitzvah is right around the corner. But after this past week, and especially the devastating flood in Texas over the holiday weekend, I’m finding it hard to string a group of words together. A girl’s camp swept away. Every day the number dead and missing rises, like the flood water. And still this administration is planning to cut NOAA’s budget and eliminate its Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), “… which performs and coordinates climate research” according to Axios.
I had to pivot to an Atlantic article on emojis titled, “What Are Emoji?” since the Grands had just informed me there are a bunch of new emojis on my phone!
There are certain people I text, with those crazy/heart/eyes/tongue/out critters attached. It’s usually the same people in my contact list who’ve earned a special ringtone; for instance, the Rocker sounds like a digital exclamation point, and Aunt Kiki has a melodic chime. I am like Pavlov’s dog when I hear Kiki’s notes because I know that twin pictures are usually attached. And I almost always reply with a text followed by a bunch of emojis, and I won’t apologize for it! But I did learn a few things about the history and evolution of the characters.
“Gen Z Has Canceled the Thumbs-Up Emoji Because It’s ‘Hostile,’ ” one headline put it, citing data gathered in surveys and in the wild. Particularly as a reply to messages that contain words, Zoomers say, the 👍 is dismissive, disrespectful, even “super rude.” It’s a digital mumble, a surly if you say so, a sure but screw you. It is passive aggression, conveyed with pictographic clarity yet wrapped in plausible deniability.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/08/emoji-internet-communication/683261/?gift=MZkyOCULmn5OA_9_ikIP-xPBU6G_1aWa5Xz2SXeIsDE&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Who knew? Well, I did think the thumbs up has been overused, and I hate seeing Mr T with his fake smile and his thumbs up. But please don’t answer me with a “K” either, it’s like a tween saying, “Fine.” And did you know who actually comes up with these pictograms? After starting out in Japan and becoming popular on internet chat boards, the emoji actually has an organization making them up and refining them: It’s called the Consortium from Houston, TX:
“…a rotating group of engineers, linguists, and typographers charged with establishing coding consistency across the internet’s static characters (letters, numbers, and the like); its goal was to enable global communication among disparate computers. Now it found itself overseeing dynamic characters as the public clamor for more emoji mounted.”
My heart goes out to all the families and friends of loved ones lost By the Guadelupe River flood. And to all the children losing their Medicaid coverage and families getting thrown off SNAP. I’m sending all y’all a giant 🤗
That’s Nixon in the corner of a Watergate era quilt at the Frist this summer.
MountainMornings 