I have a facebook account. I de-activated it once, but I came crawling back. When you de-activate your account, when you do come crawling back, your account is there waiting for you just the way you left it. You have no need to start over from scratch. They know. They know you'll come back.
A lot of people hate facebook. "It's a waste of time." "I don't like putting all my information out there, I don't like people knowing that much about me." The main reason I've come to hate facebook is that everyone in my age group (I'm thirty-four) on facebook's main objective seems to be to show off their perfect lives and their perfect kids. (For the record, my husband and I have chosen not to have kids-- and we love being child-free.)
I have to come out and say it: I don't care about looking at pictures of your kids. If that makes me a heartless bitch with no family values, then so be it.
However, I do care about pictures of your cats. :P
Now, I am guilty of bragging about my marriage. That said, that doesn't make it right. The problem with facebook, however, is that if you're not bragging about something and posting status updates that make you sound like you have a life that makes you smile until it hurts, no one's really interested. There are so many times I've wanted to post things like, "I love me some Klonopin," but no one seems to want to hear it.
The worst thing, for me anyway, is that I have friends who get away with posting witty, sassy quips dripping with cynicism about how endlessly irritated they are by other people and life in general (and by "get away with," I mean a lot of people enthusiastically press "like"). I mean, they post some wickedly, even darkly funny stuff that I would otherwise think you would have to be David Sedaris to get away with, because I sure as hell can't seem to get away with posting stuff like that. But here's the thing: these friends of mine who post this stuff tend to be either really badass, really hot (the latter trait which is made evident by their profile pic), or both. I am neither. Which leads me to another gripe about facebook: you get to see how much hotter your friends are than you.
I feel marginalized by facebook. I just can't seem to come up with a status update that will get 30 likes. You get 30 likes for posting pictures of your kids or of your hot self, whereas I get no likes because I don't have kids and I'm fat.
Hey. If I were hot, I'd milk it, too. And if you have made the decision to have kids, I would hope that you'd be crazy about them! Maybe this is me being paranoid, but my point here is that when you post pictures of your kids on facebook, I feel pressured to be crazy about your kids too. I know that's not anyone's intent, so I've just started ignoring the
pictures you upload of your, um, adorable little munchkins. It just
seems like the most reasonable course of action.
Maybe this all started when I read that article in Cosmo (another reason to hate Cosmo) about how people should and most people do play themselves up on facebook. For example, the info about me under my facebook profile pic says I work at Caudy Photography. This is technically true. I do make money from selling my fine art photography. But my steady paycheck comes from my job as a receptionist. That's just one example of how I "play myself up" on facebook, and there are probably several other ways I do it. And if I'm doing it, hell, even if I weren't doing it, I guarantee you that other people are doing it.
What if we all just dropped the act on facebook? What if we admitted that being a grownup is kind of scary and that's why we feel the need to make our lives look perfect to peers we haven't seen since we graduated from high school? What if we were honest?
Right. Not gonna happen.
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