The Many Faces of Facebook

Today, Facebook made its "biggest change since 2010" by adding a host of reaction emoji instead of the simple like thumb.

Why would it do this? Well, a more expressive list of reactions has been demanded by users since the service started oh those many years ago. Mostly, though, people just wanted a "dislike" button.

Well today folks got what they wanted, which was a bright new way for Facebook to screw up your interaction with your friends, loved ones, and asshole ultra-conservative relatives.

Much like the plot of Inside Out, Facebook chose five pretty simple reactions to include beside it's classic Like button. Instead of Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, and Fear, they doubled down on the happy and combined Fear and Disgust into Wow.

Facebook's new icons: Angry, Love, Wow, Haha, and Sad.

So, who should they have added? It would be obvious to add the middle finger or the high-five, but what we're searching for here is nuance in the discourse. We want to elevate the way people communicate over their chosen social media platform. Here are a couple of ideas:

In Defense of New Lego

Legos are a battleground. Not just figuratively in the world of our imagination, but literally. Conservatives hate their populist message. Liberals are disgruntled that the girlification takes away from the engineering. Some of the argument is understandable, since Lego did drift away from a gender neutral start, and is now very heavily invested into quite segregated product lines.

Now that the children have attained the ages of 5 and 7, we have moved into the thick of Lego building. As they are girls, we have focused on two sets: Lego Friends and Lego Elves. Oh, and a third set, Disney’s Frozen, but that feels like an extension or combination of the other two. The girls have a smattering of other sets, including Batman, Spiderman, and Lego Movie vehicles. There are also a couple of our large older sets that have hung around, including the USS Constellation and the Space Shuttle/Hubble set.

But the Elves and the Friends are here in force. To be honest, I was apprehensive. These sets were not the ones I grew up with. But I shouldn’t have feared for a couple of reasons. New Legos are awesome, and here’s why:

The Bathroom Wars

There are individuals fighting for something as fundamental as a safe place to relieve themselves. A place without threat or harassment to do something as human as stopping to pee. These folks are being labeled extremists and threatened and attacked simply for pointing out an inequality in our society.

Unisex bathrooms and the accommodation of transgender individuals has been in the news a lot. Regulations in Washington now require universal access to bathrooms, allowing transgender individuals to use bathrooms consistent to their gender identity. The legislature has attempted to block that. Other states have gone further in their anti-equality agenda.

People are concerned with privacy and safety, and are confused about line drawing. If a line is not drawn here, then where can it be drawn? But the questions of reasonable people get drowned out by the misguided or opportunistic whose only goal is to segregate and embarrass based on gender identity. It is deeply disturbing the kind of hate and fear mongering that has surrounded this issue.

I am on the edges of the Bathroom Wars. As a stay-at-home father raising two young daughters, every day that we go out in public, I have to make a conscious decision on which bathroom is appropriate to use. It’s unusual to see a guy standing out in front of the women’s room in the middle of the day. I get to be that guy.

In many ways, we are lucky. We get to make the decision on which bathroom to visit based on cleanliness and access, but generally we make it from a position of complete safety. No one is going to mess with the crazy dad guarding his daughters’ bathroom stall. That is not afforded to many transgender as they are threatened or harassed for choosing “wrong.” This experience has given me a deep empathy for what transgender individuals experience.

Obligatory Mr. Mom poster.

I've also gotten a different perspective than many families may have. That perspective boils down to two things: First, unisex bathrooms and universal access improve life for everyone. Second, the problem is not people, it’s the facilities themselves.

The Weird Emasculation of Giving Away Tools

Lucky for me, I’ve never had need to fully rebuild the engine of a car. While cars are not a hobby for me, I’m confident in my ability to repair pretty much anything on a car, given time. It would need to be a lot of time, probably. But the need has never been there. Any big car repair happened when a car was so vital that I spent the money to get it fixed fast. And now our car is not driven enough to rack up enough charges that would put me in a position to do any myself.

However, I had a complete toolbox ready for the job. And if it wasn’t an engine, I could build a wall or dismantle a lawnmower or fell a tree. I inherited, bought, traded, and accumulated a this massive pool of steel. The box was red of course. It included a full set of ratchets in metric and standard for three sizes of handle. Various wire cutters, pliers, wrenches, and screw drivers were in there. A jigsaw. A cordless drill. Chisels, stud finder, and a particular kind of wedge used to crack paving blocks. Wire bristle drill bits, Dremel bits, and a few random drill chucks.

So many tools.

The important part is that it was my toolbox. I gave it away. In the seven years that I have had daughters, and the three years that raising them has been my full time job, my sexuality and masculinity have been questioned. A lot. In ways great and small. But there has been nothing quite as emasculating as giving away a box of tools.

Once Again, the Rules for a Proper Hate Obituary

When a divisive figure dies, as is the case with today's passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, we find ourselves in a very familiar news cycle. Today's surprise is processed to become a retrospective of the person's life. In that retrospective, some warts become points of focus until someone pens a hate obituary. A couple years ago, I saw this happening after the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy. It occurred to me that something felt off about this last stage. Inevitably, with the notoriety of Scalia's positions on contentious issues and his willingness to mouth off about them, the hate obituary train is going to roll again.

Just as the cycle turns, it is time we once again review the three rules for drafting the proper hate obituary:

Laugh at me. Please.

I frequently lament the absence of a good nonsense movie in today's world. I once explained Monty Python to my brother as "do you find a sheep exploding to be funny? Then you laugh."  The end of their show and the beginning of the Monty Python movies pretty closely overlapped by the rise of the Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker movies and National Lampoons. The early 80s was probably the high water mark of the nonsense comedy film.

Airplane. 

Because the Catholic Schoolgirls In Trouble clip is just too damn funny for family consumption.

I would suggest that these are the best of the nonsense movies because the laughs come first. The jokes run the spectrum from high-brow word play to slapping each other with fish. But the jokes are never second to a plot point and they are never abandoned for a happy ending.  At the end of Airplane! or Animal House, the characters are victorious in landing the plane or destroying the parade, but they don't give up what made them funny.  The characters continue to be horrible people, and we are still laughing.