On Going Home

I consider Minneapolis my hometown, though I’ve spent more of my life gazing at it from a distance than within its city limits. Growing up in Rosemount (a blemish on my biographical geography, although I love the home where I grew up), I looked longingly to New York but also, more realistically, toward Minneapolis. (Both [...]

Emoticonoclasm

Emoticons have become a little too central to my interactions with people of late. The following is a letter that came from one such conversation…
Dear Chris,
Hello. Megan and I have spent the afternoon on what professional cartoonists call “new character development.” In discussing the cultural underpinnings of various emoticons, I happened to mention that in [...]

Slashy and ‘Stachey

This Sunday the New York Times ran an article on emoticons, which several people–apprised of this textual fixation of mine–brought to my attention. Perhaps it is because I consider myself something of an amateur emoticon-semiologist that I found its legend (see the multimedia sidebar) a little un-nuanced.
A lot of my g-chat conversations with Chris [...]