Loyal Subscribers

June 8, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
How do you build loyal subscribers?
View all responses

I find it interesting that most of these blog prompts have nothing to do with me, such as today’s prompt about building loyal subscribers. I have no idea how to build loyalty, have no idea if anyone has even subscribed to my blog. I do know a few friends get my blog by email, which isn’t really fair — they get to keep up with me on a daily basis, and I don’t know what’s going on with them. You’d think they’d be kind enough to reciprocate with their own blog, wouldn’t you? (I’m being facetious. If I want to know what’s going on with them, I could simply call, and I don’t, so who’s the one who isn’t being fair?)

Actually, according to WordPress, I do have some subscribers, and a few more have subscribed in the past few days, so thank you for subscribing!

As for building loyalty — apparently, somewhere along the line I have done so since I see many of the same names in comments and “likes,” but as I’ve mentioned before, I have no idea why anyone reads what I write, though I do appreciate everyone who does. It makes blogging seem so much less like throwing a tiny penlight out into the great darkness of the unknown and more like connecting with friends.

There are some people who have been with me almost from the beginning — starting from the time I wrote about writing, then tumbling into the whole morass of grief with me, and still showing up now that my posts range from stream of consciousness to gardening. Truly, hands across the nations! (Did I mention how grateful I am for you? Well, it bears repeating.)

I might not know how to purposely build a following, but I know how not to build subscribers by the millions — don’t be controversial. Almost all people who garner those sorts of numbers and that sort of loyalty do so by talking about things that gets people emotional, and I don’t want to do that. I know how a lot of my readers think, and I’d just as soon not get into discussions that either get my ire up or theirs. (And I don’t like to have to think of tactful ways of saying I disagree, so I don’t.)

Another way not to build loyal subscribers is to not show a bias because bias automatically gives people a connection to you. It’s almost impossible not to show a bias, and I’m sure mine shows occasionally, though my bias tends to be for irony and intelligence and truth-seeking rather than for any movement or ideology. And I have a definite bias against hypocrisy, emotion that passes as fact, and regimentation of thought. I spent most of my life around people who loved to force people to think their way, so I became adept at changing midstream partly to keep the peace and partly because I didn’t care enough either way to argue the point.

But then, can anyone tell if they are really bias-free? I’m not sure. It seems ingrained so that a biased person acts as if their bias is the truth rather than simply their way of seeing the truth. Case in point: one popular quasi news show has been bleeding viewers because a lot of people don’t like its far-left liberal slant, and all the journalists on the show profess to have no idea there is a slant — they thought they were being impartial.

Seems like a good idea for me to keep keeping away from controversial topics — that way I can keep my bias to myself. And I can keep the readers I have rather than trying to grow a larger subscriber’s list, which I don’t know how to do anyway.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, internet, photography, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 7 Comments »

Recommended Tags

June 5, 2026 — Pat Bertram

In yesterday’s blog post, I wrote about gardening being A Strange Avocation, and I explained the difference in the behavior of flowers between this year and previous years. The tags I used for the post are gardening, home, life, bees and flowers, bees in a garden, larkspur, lily trees, purple echinacea, purple echinacea turned pink, yarrow. All garden related and directly related to the article I posted.

WordPress, the platform that hosts this blog, has an AI tool that suggests various tags for posts. In case you don’t know, tags are words or phrases that bloggers use to help people find their articles. For example, broad tags such as “gardening,” don’t do much to drive people to a blog post since they are too general. If someone were to Google “gardening,” they’d get millions upon millions of hits, and the chance of their finding any particular article are close to nil. Specific tags are best, or so they say, because the chances of someone stumbling upon your immortal words are a lot better. (I was being facetious about the “immortal words,” making fun of the fact that so few of our blog posts say anything of importance, and yet, in the electronic age, everyone’s words, no matter how puerile, truly are immortal.)

You will never in a million years guess the words that the all-seeing, all-knowing AI suggested for that gardening post, so I’ll just list them for you: “Auto immune disease, breastfeeding, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s, IBD.” How is that even possible? I’ve gone over and over what I wrote yesterday, and I cannot see anything that could possibly have generated such a wildly inappropriate group of words.

I know artificial intelligence is supposed to be a great thing, and it might be for other people, but I’m not that impressed. From what I have seen, generative AI in particular is not any more intelligent than most humans seem to be. (I slipped and called it degenerative AI before I corrected myself, but I like that term!) It also has huge biases, especially political ones, which makes sense, I suppose, since the vast majority of news sources and sites like Wikipedia are liberal, and generative AI is only as smart as its input. It would be nice to be able to use Google’s AI generated summaries for a quick perusal of any given topic, but I can’t rely on its answers because it makes mistakes that I know are mistakes. It doesn’t always understand the question, either. I wanted to check out “immortal words” to make sure I wasn’t making up the phrase, and all the AI would tell me is what immortal meant. I also wanted a quick definition for “tags,” and what I got was a whole lot of information about where to buy paper tags with strings. (I’ve noticed more often that search engines seem to be geared to products first, so if I want to know the definition of something, and it happens to be the name of a musical group or a brand name or whatever, that is what shows up, not the more generic term that I was looking for.)

I suppose, in Pollyanna-style, I should be glad that I didn’t need the suggested tags. Glad I don’t know enough about those medical issues from a personal angle to write about them. But still . . . utterly bizarre.

Actually, I’m not one to talk about intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Earlier, I was doing a puzzle, and I needed an eight-letter word beginning with L for a flower. And all I could think of was lavender. Lavender? Really? When I’d spent hours in the morning clearing away larkspur? When I’ve written post after post mentioning larkspur?

Oh, well, such is life. My life, anyway.

PS: The recommended tags for this post are Project Life, Heidi Swapp, San Diego Comic Con, Becky Higgins, Studio Calico. I don’t even know what most of that is!

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, gardening, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Unlimited Budget

May 31, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
If you had an unlimited budget for 24 hours, what would you do?
View all responses

This blog prompt should have been a no brainer. Unfortunately, because I overthink everything, I have a hard time with hypothetical questions, this one most of all. For example, I started out wondering what it means by “budget.” To me (and to the dictionary), a budget is basically a financial plan that helps a person understand what money they have to spend every month, allocates a sufficient amount of income for fixed expenditures such as rent and utilities, and helps control spending to avoid going into debt. But that definition doesn’t fit the postulated scenario at all. I suppose I could make out a budget for an infinite amount of income for a day without actually spending anything, but it seems a waste to go through all that simply for one day’s worth of phony money.

So if the question isn’t about a budget as such, does it mean simply having an infinite amount of money to spend for one day? If so, how does the money appear? A credit card with no limit? If so, who pays the bill? Or does the money appear in my banking account? If so, how does the depositer know how much I will be spending?

Do I know ahead of time what day that “unlimited budget” will show up so I can plan how to use the largess? Or will it just appear one day, leaving me to wing it, and hoping I don’t get so overwrought by the stress of it all that I blow the whole deal?

And how does one spend the money? Go online and book airline trips and cruises for a future day? Will the travel plans still be available when the time comes, or will they have disappeared along with that “unlimited budget” day?

How would a credit card work anyway? The charges don’t always show up the same day as an order is placed, so if I were to buy a whole lot of stuff at a mall or online or wherever, there’s a chance that once the “unlimited budget” deal expired, I’d get stuck with a bill for things I would never have bought in the first place.

It would make sense to buy property or some other tangible asset, but I know for a fact, one cannot buy any property in a single day. Or maybe one can if one has that “unlimited budget” at one’s disposal. But still, I tend to think not. Realtors, lawyers, sellers, escrow folk and everyone else involved in a major sale don’t work on a moment’s notice.

I would think a good use of the budget would be to write checks to local non-profits, but would the money still be there when they cashed the checks? It doesn’t seem like it would be, and I have a hunch if I went to the bank and got trunk loads of cash to hand out to those groups, I would get into a whole lot of trouble. First of all, you can’t take out too much cash from a bank without dealing with a lot of paperwork. Second of all, unless the organizers were greedy and grabbed the cash for themselves, they’d certainly have questions about its legitimacy.

It all seems like too much headache.

In the end, I suppose I’d just buy what I normally buy on any given day, which is . . . not a single thing.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 3 Comments »

The Venerable Vegetable

May 22, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a word or phrase that annoys you?
View all responses

There used to be many words and phrases that annoyed me, constructions such as “110%” and “intestinal fortitude,” but those instances seem so innocuous now that other words have begun to be used half to death (to the death of the word, that is), words like fascist and nazi and racist and whatever happens to be the phobe of the day.

I don’t know if I’m getting used to words that are so overused that they’ve become meaningless or if I’m less critical or . . . who knows. All I know is that there are now fewer words that irk me. And yet there is one word that I will never, ever use. Will never, ever hear without my teeth gritting or feeling the word scrape down my back like some unseen claw.

I can avoid other words, even the most hateful and prevalent, because people I’m around in real life don’t use them, and if I’m reading the words online, I can quickly skim past them before they sneak in under my skin.

But there is that one word, a word I can barely manage to even type, so I’ll close my eyes and hope I get it right. “Veggies.” There. I did it. Whew! The very sight, the very sound of that mawkish word gags me, but it is now universal. It’s as if no one knows how to say or write or spell the word “vegetables” anymore. I mean that literally. I am the only person I know who says “vegetables.” I can understand urging small children to eat their “veggies,” but when said by an adult to an adult, it seems . . . disrespectful.

Are vegetables really that onerous that they need an infantile nickname? Are we in such a hurry that we can’t manage to say the whole of the venerable “vegetable?” And it is a venerable word. It comes from the Medieval Latin word vegetabilis, meaning “growing, flourishing, or full of life.” It was used from the Middle Ages on to denote all plants, not just edible ones, because plants are capable of life and growth as opposed to inert minerals.

And so what do we have today instead of life and growth and vigor? The cringeworthy “veggies,” which means absolutely nothing.

I realize I am one of the few purists left when it comes to words. Oh, I know the argument, that language is ever evolving, and I understand that. I would just prefer that it evolved around other words I don’t have to hear every day even from people I like.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, culture, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 6 Comments »

Solitude

May 11, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I came across an interesting quote this morning by the French writer known simply as Colette: “There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.”

What’s interesting to me about this quote is that, although solitude was an issue with her, it isn’t for me. She died almost 75 years ago, so obviously, the times were different. Today I’m not sure there is such a thing as a poisonous solitude that makes one want to beat one’s head against the wall. We are all just fingertips away from connecting with the world, and if not that, then we’re just minutes away from a store where for the price of a loaf of bread, we can talk to a checkout clerk for a few minutes.

Admittedly, I am minimizing her pain, but I don’t feel that solitude is a big issue — not for me, anyway. I have people I can call or go visit, I can take a walk or work in my garden where people tend to find me. So solitude by itself isn’t a bitter tonic or a poison. Nor is it the heady wine she speaks of. It just is the way I’ve ordered my life (or perhaps the way life ordered me).

Loneliness, on the other hand, can be a bitter tonic if not poisonous, since it doesn’t have an easy fix. I mean, just by going out among people you can cure solitude, because even if you don’t know the people, you’re not solitary anymore. But loneliness isn’t as easy as being around people because one can be lonely in a crowd. One can also be lonely for a particular person, and if that person isn’t around, then the loneliness can be agonizing for sure.

Solitary and lonely — that’s not a good combination, though I tend to think it’s the loneliness that’s the problem, not the aloneness, but then, what do I know. I don’t often get lonely anymore since I am used to Jeff being gone. I am also solitary by nature, though if I am visiting with someone, I can be as garrulous and as sociable as those who prefer to wrap a peopled world around themselves.

I know some of you are lonely, though perhaps not solitary. Others are both lonely and solitary. Life can be bitter for those who have lost the one person that made their life a more loving and friendly place to be, so I don’t want you to think I’m diminishing your pain.

I’m just . . . thinking.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in life, relationships, writing. Tags: , , , , . 9 Comments »

Ordinariness as a Super Power

May 8, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What super power do you wish you had and why?
View all responses

When I was young, I thought mental super powers, such as telepathy and telekinesis, as well as the ability to see ghosts, were a sign of an advanced spirituality, that people who had such abilities vibrated at a higher frequency than normal. I found it disappointing that I was merely normal, not supranormal, just one of the masses. Nothing extraordinary.

Now I find comfort in that ordinariness. I’m glad I can’t read people’s thoughts, even more glad that they can’t read mine. To tell the truth, for the most part, I don’t even want to be privy to my own thoughts, which is why I try to focus on the moment and not let my thoughts overwhelm me. Besides, who needs telepathy when there is writing — seeing a few words or writing a few words exchanges thoughts from one person to another in a quite orderly and controlled manner. And conversation, of course. That’s an even more ordinary way of learning someone’s thoughts.

The telekinesis I exhibit is the ability to get up and get what I want, which is pretty remarkable, when you think of it. As for ghosts . . . no. Just no. My sister says she saw a ghost in my house, and if that old lady ghost lives here, at least she isn’t bothersome. I like being alone in my own space.

Although I sometimes think it would be great having the ability to manipulate the earth’s energy as do the power-wielders in The Wheel of Time books, I don’t see how that would add to my life. When I am reading those books, I can almost see the veneer of the world parting to allow me to step from one place to another, but there’s really no place I want to be other than where I am.

Unless a person is living in a comic strip or a magical novel, most super powers seem superfluous. Being able to fly, become invisible, shapeshift, time travel, control people’s minds, manipulate the weather, use elements such as fire and metal and water, foretell the future, live forever — it all seems too much of a good thing. I wouldn’t want to be burdened with any of it.

I tend to think my super power, if there is such a thing, is my ordinariness. Now that I am not young enough to want to be special, I would choose to be ordinary even it wasn’t already within my grasp. Because truly, ordinariness is a super power. At least, it is for me.

I can be . . . me. I don’t need to be someone other than what I am. Don’t need to grasp for specialness. Don’t need to compare myself to others. Don’t need to reach beyond what I have. Being ordinary and accepting my ordinariness allows me to embrace the special joys that come from simple pleasures, allows me to look beyond myself and engage in meaningful moments with others. Admittedly, ordinariness isn’t the sort of super power that creates comic book characters, but it’s the sort of power that allows a person to live a life of peace.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, history/myth, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . 3 Comments »

Family Mysteries

May 7, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a mystery from your own life that you’ve never solved?
View all responses

I’ve always loved stories about family mysteries and secrets. It’s such a delicious feeling reading about people discovering that what they thought they knew, they didn’t. That their reality was in truth something completely different.

If there are any secrets in my family, they are just that — secret — since I have never heard of any. There are a couple of interesting family stories, though, with maybe a bit of mystery attached.

According to family lore, our family comes by its insanity naturally — we inherited it. My great-grandfather was a scientist and inventor. He worked with Edison and other renowned scientists of the day, perhaps even Tesla. He invented the postmarking machine and foolishly sold the patent to get funds to invent a subway sweeper that never caught on. The people who supposedly did him a favor by buying the patent, became very rich because that postmarking machine was used continuously until the digital age made it obsolete. This otherwise intelligent man had been married twice. One wife he threw down the stairs. The other he consigned to the Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island.

No one knows which of my great-grandfather’s wives is my great-grandmother (and therein lies whatever mystery this story contains), but even if she weren’t the one committed (especially since there’s a chance he had her committed for his own reasons rather than her mental state), the insanity could come from dear old great-grandfather himself because there does seem to be a portion of insanity in incarcerating one woman and tossing another down the stairs.

Whatever genius he had wasn’t passed on to me, which is just as well. Too many geniuses seem to be unbalanced, and I much prefer the balance I’ve managed to find in my life.

There is another story that I think about — my mother’s brother ran away in his teens. He couldn’t handle school, was considered slow, but who knows the truth of that. Back then they didn’t have names like dyslexic, and ADHD, and whatever else they call kids who have a hard time in school. This uncle completely disappeared. No one in the family ever heard from him again. A couple of decades ago, the church in the small town where my mother and her siblings were raised got a request from a family in Florida for his birth certificate so they could arrange his funeral. Wait — does that make sense? Why would they need a birth certificate? Anyway, for whatever reason, the family contacted the church, and that’s when his siblings found out he’d been living with this family as a caretaker, jack-of-all trades, and adopted grandfather. I have no idea when or how he met up with this family. I don’t know what he’d been doing after he ran away. I never even knew he existed, frankly. But it does make me happy that this boy who ran away because he didn’t fit found a place where he did fit.

No much as secrets go, but there it is. My family life laid bare.

Eccentric scientist with wild hair and glasses holding a flask with green and purple liquid in a cluttered lab with sparks and chemical equipment

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in history/myth, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

No Doubts

May 3, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Truth is hard to come by these days because no one has any doubts. No matter the side people are on, if there are sides, they all believe absolutely that they’re right.

What happened to doubts, to thinking that “Yes, ‘A’ seems right but maybe ‘B’ has points, too”? The trouble with people not having any doubts, who believe unquestionably in the rightness of their stance, is that they never seem to take into consideration things like trade-offs. A measles vaccine saves lives, but it also destroys some lives. There is a whole lot of doubt in the discussion, but you never see it, just utter “knowing” on both sides.

It’s not just online — that absence of doubt — but also conversations in person. It’s hard to converse with people who have no doubts, who know what they know and have no interest in knowing anything else.

I don’t think there’s anything that’s so true — so doubtless — that it’s set in stone. Not even the pyramids, talking of stone. The research I did years ago makes me think the pyramids are not tombs. The later ones, perhaps, were created as tombs, after people lost the reason for the pyramids, but originally they seem to have been a means of pulling energy directly from the earth, a lost art that Nicola Tesla tried to recreate with his various experiments, including the Colorado Springs wireless electricity tests and his Wardenclyffe Tower. There’s a lot of talk in certain segments of the internet about such lost technologies, as well as the theory of Tartaria, an advanced civilization that supposedly was erased from human memory when the world was “reset”. Although it’s fun reading about such theories and seeing the “proof,” I don’t really believe in a reset theory, and yet other research I did years ago, on the origins of the Black Death, makes it seem as if that could have been a reset, a way of stopping an explosion of human progress.

People who believe in such things have no doubt that they are true. Those who don’t believe have no doubts that they are false.

What happened to doubting? Maybe doubt is another lost art.

A few weeks ago, some fellow left a few comments here on my blog telling me that if I’m writing for myself, I have no business publishing my articles, that writing is a service writers do for others. He is convinced of his rightness, but I have doubts. For one thing, I am not narcissistic enough to believe that everyone wants to read what I write; in which case, any writing I do has to be for me. It also seems to me that so much that is written is garbage, which is certainly no service to anyone. And it’s garbage because people are writing for others. They write the books they think people want to read, they post the memes they think people want to see, write articles they think people want to believe, and in all of that, the truth gets lost.

Oddly as it sounds, I’m beginning to think that truth can be found in the doubts. And maybe that’s where wisdom lies, too — in the doubts.

As Robert Jordan wrote: “You can never know everything, and part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps even the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of courage lies in going on anyways.”

This could be why wisdom is so hard to come by nowadays — no one has any doubts. No one even seems to know there is anything to doubt about their position.

It’s possible I believe so much in the importance of doubting because I have doubts about everything. But who knows? Not me, that’s for sure!

 

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in blogging, history/myth, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , . 4 Comments »

Puzzled About Puzzles

May 2, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Now that I’m not going to the library and am only reading or rereading the books in my house, I’ve mostly exchanged my reading time for pencil puzzle-solving time. I have a foot high stack of puzzles that I bought years ago when I moved here, but then I got caught up in visiting the library because it felt like such a treat.

Well, library visits aren’t a treat anymore, and the puzzles are.

When you are working a puzzle, such as a crossword puzzle, and you come to the end of what you can do on your own, do you consider it cheating to look at the solution for hints so you can finish the puzzle? Or do you see checking the answer as part of the fun of doing puzzles? Or do you abandon the puzzle unfinished to keep from cheating? If you do consider it cheating to check the solution for an answer you have no way of figuring out, do you also consider it cheating to ask someone, to use a crossword puzzle dictionary, or to look online for the answer to the clue? Do you find yourself shying away from difficult puzzles because you can’t do them without periodically checking the answer?

Years ago, I might have considered it cheating to look at the answers, but I don’t now and haven’t for a long time. It’s all part of the game for me, a way to keep the puzzle going if I hit a wall, a way to up the challenge. If I only do puzzles that are easy enough to “win” all the time, what’s the point? And anyway, if I complete the puzzle, I don’t consider it a win as much as a chance to start a different puzzle.

I’m just curious what people think. Doing the puzzles again reminded me of a discussion I had with someone years ago. I didn’t know her, she was just responding to a blog post where I pretty much asked the same questions as I am doing here, but it shocked me when she berated me on my behavior. She was appalled that I would cheat, because even if you “cheat” when it’s just a game you’re playing against yourself, then it’s still cheating

So, I know one person’s answer!

And I know mine. To me, cheating connotes an intention to deceive, and since I’m not deceiving anyone, not even myself, doing the puzzles, however they are solved, is all just a way of passing the time. Maybe it’s even a way of exercising my mind. And perhaps I’m even learning something along the way. Besides, tossing out a puzzle just because I couldn’t finish it without a quick look to see where to go next, is a waste of money. Admittedly, I bought past-date puzzle books in bulk, so each puzzle probably cost less than a penny, but even at a penny, an unfinished puzzle is a waste.

Speaking of puzzles, I created the following puzzles in 2009 for a promotion when A Spark of Heavenly Fire was published. Instead of numbers, these Sudoku puzzles use the letters from the title of the book: A, S, P, R, K, O, F, I, E.

Have fun solving! And if you get stuck, click here to find the solution: Spark of Heavenly Fire Sudoku solution.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in culture, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Nix on the Happy Face

April 28, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What are your favorite emojis?
View all responses

I have never liked any emoji even before they became emojis. Especially the idiotic happy face that began it all.

I wasn’t aware of the smiley face in its infancy because it was an inhouse graphic created for State Mutual Life Assurance Company in 1963 to make their employees happier about a corporate merger. The face quickly moved beyond those bounds, and in Denver, in the late sixties, a jewelry store passed out happy-face stickers for a promotion, so that sappy yellow face was everywhere. I don’t know why — perhaps because it was everywhere — I couldn’t bring myself to like the insipid thing.

Even worse was after Hallmark took over the design in 1971, added “Have a happy day,” and then expected people to . . . I don’t know . . . give Hallmark happy days by buying happy faces, I guess.

I disliked “Have a happy day,” even more when it replaced “thank you,” as a farewell to shoppers who’d completed a purchase. I was depressed a lot back then, which made that whole “have a happy day” thing seem like a slap in the face, but more than that, it was so utterly phony, it depressed me further. Ironically, I’d give anything to have people go back to “Have a happy day” if they’d only get rid of today’s version, “Have a good one.” That sure makes me cringe! “Have a good one what?” I ask when I’m feeling particularly curmudgeonly. I can’t help but think of caregivers asking their elderly constipated patients if they’d had a “good one” that day.

In my life, almost always things I like disappear, most recently the most useful sprinkler I’ve ever found, with several water patterns as well as an ability to convert it to a hand-held sprinkler. But that sappy face? Nope. Now that it’s a global necessity, embedded in almost all computer programs, it will hound me forever.

Admittedly, I’ve used various emojis when trying to elucidate what I thought a witty comment, but that didn’t always work well.

Many years ago, I signed up for a dating site at the instigation of a married friend who wanted the vicarious experience. I eventually ended up communicating with one fellow who mentioned that he loved laughing and humor, and I don’t remember the comment I made, but it was supposed to be a humorous response to his humorous comment, and to emphasize the point, I added a happy face emoji. He took the comment at face value, and got nasty with me. I explained that the emoji was an indicator of it being a joke, and he got even more angry and said he didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone who had to use happy faces to explain what she was saying. Apparently, the only one who was supposed to funny was him. I tried a different site, and there he was again. So, to my friend’s disappointment, that was the end of my efforts.

But not, alas, the end of emojis. If I do grit my teeth and use any emoji to end a text conversation, it’s something simple like a heart or a tree, but mostly, I stick with (gasp!) words. It’s so much better for my peace of mind.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in internet, life, relationships, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments »
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