What Emoticon Do I Use For That?

The other day after work, it started to rain and the bus was late picking me up. I did what anyone would do in my situation. I pulled out my cell phone and sent a text to my friends and my husband informing them of my mildly inconvenient predicament.

When it came time for me to describe how these events made me feel, however, I was at a loss. There was no emoticon that could adequately express how I was feeling at that moment. An angry face seemed too extreme. The bus was only ten minutes late, after all, and it wasn’t raining that hard. Plus, like I said, it was the end of the day. I was on my way home and I didn’t need to get there in any great hurry. Still, I felt mildly annoyed and I needed to express it to someone. I thought of using an indifferent face emoticon, but that didn’t seem strong enough. I had a serious conundrum on my hands with no obvious solution. What I ended up doing was using both the indifferent face and an angry face emoticons and telling my text buddies that the emotion I was feeling fell somewhere in between the two. Luckily, they understood what I meant. But what if they hadn’t? Lately, I’ve been feeling like the emoticons on my cell phone do not adequately express many of the emotions that I am trying to convey to the people I am texting and I don’t know what to do about it.

How, for example, am I supposed to use emoticons to express my joy when the song Titanium comes on my Pandora station? I love that song. I enjoy hearing it, but the joy I feel is too short-lived to be worthy of a smiley face. In my mind, no song is smiley face worthy. A good episode of television might be smiley face worthy, but only if it’s an hour long show and only if something really great happens. But that’s a stretch. For me, smiley face worthy events include things like winning the lottery or finding a cure for cancer. Anything less than that just feels like hyperbole.

So, here I am, a human with lots of emotions and no way to express them (seriously, how did people express emotions before the advent of emoticons?). I suppose there is probably a way to download additional emoticons to my cell phone. It’s probably pretty easy and it probably doesn’t cost that much but who has time to do the research on something like that? I mean really. It could take up to two minutes or more. I will just continue to suffer in silence. If you need me, I’ll be somewhere between a sad face and a crying face.