the problem with facebook

the problem with facebook is that for a while, I was addicted.

Our History
I loved it. Facebook sent me an email a few years ago, letting me know that my old friend K______ B______ had joined, and wouldn't I like to join too? I didn't know how fb got my email, or how it knew that K______ B_____ and I had been friends who lost touch, but I joined just to see what she was up to. And then a few days later, facebook let me know that double stuff oreo wanted to be my friend, would I accept? Hell yeah! And then fb put me in touch with a few other people and I was really happy to see how they were doing. Funny,even now, the people that I am the most interested in are the people I was first "friends" with. And then it finally found my old friend J______ W_______ who I really had really missed over the years and was so happy to hear from.

the inevitable downward spiral
200+ friends later, I was spending too much time on fb. When you are a stay at home mom, you can't screw around at work when you boss isn't looking, so after I finally got the kids into bed I used my precious me-time to spy on people on fb, sometimes for more than an hour. And it always leads to other gratuitous Internet surfing, and I was going to bed after midnight, and then having to wake up at all hours to take care of various children and couldn't fall back to sleep due to Hyphen's constant and horrendous snoring. And then wondering why I felt so terrible.

rock bottom
Facebook then decided that it knew me better than I do. And it decided that I actually wanted to hear about someone who we will call Perosn X (real creative, I know) Person X is actually an amalgam of several dysfunctional people who are proud of their dysfunction and like to share it. Person X is going through a horrible divorce/break up. Person X hates their ex. Person X is now back together with their X. Person X just went shopping. Person X has the best boyfriend in the world. Person X just went hunting. Person X just got a mani/pedi. Etc.

In short, person X was taking up all my newsfeed, despite my best efforts to change it. Because all person X ever does is spend time on facebook. I would log on and see all the posts and realize that I didn't care and would rather scrub my floor than vote on whether person X should get a tattoo.

realization
And then the Jackie O interview book came out. And I started to think about privacy. And mystique. How some things should remain private. How in a tell all society, where we keep up with the Kardashians, fb is our own reality show. And I got really grossed out.

So I decided to limit my time to fb to twice a week. We'll see if I can do it.

By the way, if you are reading this blog and wondering whether you are person X, the answer is, yes, you are. We are all person X.