Emotional About Facebook

Sell my clothes; I’ve gone to Heaven!  Last week, the boys (and girls, too, I assume) down at Facebook thought we were finally mature enough to handle it and gave us emotions.  Wow!  For years, we’ve been hanging with our Cyber-friends, incapable of doing anything more than “Liking” and “Sharing” — kinda like first-term Kindergarten kids learning how to play nice with the other children.  Now, we can like, love, laugh and be happy — all at the click of a mouse — plus we can be sad and even hate.  Yeah, hate: the #1 bad boy for all millennials.  Cool, huh!

Here’s the deal.

1 — The new emotions were test-driven in Spain.  Curious choice?  Why not Holland?  Or India?  Or Canada?  Quite frankly, I’d pay money to find out who in the vast Zuckerburg Empire decided the Spanish were the emotional weathervane for the rest of us.

2 — We got one more emotion than Riley Andersen, the 11-year-old from the Disney movie Inside Out.  (She got 5; we get 6.)  Take that, you little cartoon rodent!  Goes to show ya the boys and girls at Facebook are willing to play hardball with the corporate big kids from The Magic Kingdom.  It’s kind of a subtle “our marketing department can beat up your marketing department.”  Personally, I can’t address this situation since I’m boycotting Disney right now because they refused to include Nala, from The Lion King, in their pantheon of Disney princesses.  Simba was raised by a same-sex couple, Timon and Pumbaa, and nobody bats an eye, but call somebody with a tail a princess and everybody’s all up in your face.  Damn species-ists!  But I digress.

3 — We still don’t get a “Dislike” icon.  There’s overwhelming evidence that all most Facebook users (Facebookers?) want is a way to “Dislike” those stupid cat pictures or political rants or the “share this post or you’re a heartless bastard” blackmail.  However, Facebook decided that it would be too “hurtful” and “negative” to let us actually dislike things.  I imagine when we get older, we’ll realize this cyber-guidance was for our own good.

4 — We can only have one emotion at a time.  As we all remember from puberty, adult emotions can be tough to deal with, but the folks at Facebook understand this and are making sure we go slowly at first so we don’t do silly things like “hate” something so much we make ourselves “sad.”

Anyway, I love these new emotions on Facebook.  I’m feeling all excited and virginal, and even though I can hardly wait to try cyber-crying for the first time, I kinda wanna save myself for the right moment.  Maybe I’ll just light some candles, open a bottle of wine and wait for somebody to post pictures of puppies — homeless puppies.