When I started to reconnect with college friends on Facebook, I began to experience a familiar kind of dread that I hadn't felt for many years. It was the social apprehension of my college years resurfacing now in my relatively placid and self confident 40s. Would people from college still be haughty and patronizing to me? Would I once again be the nerdy, second rate guy who never got a date?

The apprehensive feeling itself was a useful thing to go through on its own. It reminded me that old emotions from years past often follow us around later in life, lurking just beneath the surface. If I'm anxious about social situations today, perhaps it's really just an artifact of those miserable college years. I always say, take advantage of negative feelings and experiences to learn about yourself and try to grow. The apprehension I felt around Facebook was a tip off that I was onto an opportunity for growth, even if it might be a little painful.

I need not have worried so much. With Facebook, I found that some of the people I had once feared socially had matured and were quite gracious and friendly to me. Others wanted to be “friends” but not interact much… and that was fine with me. Okay, I thought to myself. Let's be friends here, but we don't have to be best friends. Others still I saw, but chose not to connect to - ultimately Facebook has proved to be an empowering experience for me.

At the same time, some characters from the past have revealed that they have not grown at all. Once a need narcissist, always a needy narcissist, it seems with some folks. Blowing one's horn gratuitously on Facebook seems pathetic to me, and once again the experience was one of empowerment. I had grown, but the other person hadn't. Facebook gave me some closure on the relationship. I need not dwell in that person's aura any longer.

Finally, Facebook can be fun. And we all need some fun therapy. I know I do.

Emoticons - love "em or hate "em, you can't escape them. Those little faces which have reduced our emotional expressions to a couple keystrokes and some pixels…. Well, sometimes it feels as though they've taken over the world, with a life of their own. But we use them all the same, for fun and convenience while expressing ourselves during that oh so postmodern phenomenon of communicating by internet chat.

Whatever your chat service of choice, there is surely an emoticon service that comes along with it. Gmail is my personal favourite; I live in my email, as do many of my friends and colleagues, so it only makes sense to exchange news, plans and gossip from right within the chat screen. Gmail's convenience is also fun… the emoticons available on gmail chat are among my favourites, because they're animated in a slow and attractive way, while still derived from the old-fashioned vocabulary of semicolons and round brackets. None of these flashy yellow happy faces with pink tongues and annoying voices for me!

So if you love gmail, and feel that nothing expresses your mood like a couple of dots and a dash, then check out this list of animated emoticons for gmail. You might find a few new ones you'd never imagined, like the cowbell, for those hard-to-define feelings that sweep over you from time to time.

[angry] = x-(

[big nose wink] = ;^)

[cool] = B-)

[cowbell] = +/'\

[cry] = :'(

[devil] = }:-)

[equal grin] = =D

[equal smile] = =)

[frown] = :(

[grin] = :D

[mustache] = :{

[pig] = :(:)

[crab] = V.v.V

[heart] = <3

[broken heart] =

[monkey] = :(|)

[nose grin] = :-D

[nose smile] = :-)

[nose wink] = ;-)

[rockout] = \m/

[shocked] = :-o

[slant] = :-/

[smile] = :)

[straightface] = :-|

[tongue] = :P

[wince] = >.<

[kiss star] = :*

[kiss x] = :-x