I Might Be Fickle

I'll own it. I love facebook.

You're probably going to remind me that I have written the exact opposite of that statement before. And that I have a blog tag that says "facebook sucks."

I'll own it. I'm a hypocrite.

For real, though, I did not know it was possible to simultaneously love and hate something so much.

I check it all the time. I probably see everything you post on my news feed. I like knowing what my friends (and mild acquaintances) are up to. I'm narcissistic enough to believe that people want to hear about what I'm doing and see pictures of me.

But I think some of the appeal might be the danger in it.

Facebook is like one big game of emotional roulette. About 20% of the time after going on facebook, I feel bad about myself.

There I'll be, looking at pictures of someone's baby or wedding or what they ate that day (seriously, why do you post pictures of you food? that's one thing I don't care about), and I'll be loving every minute of it.

And then, BAM!

Someone I went to school with just got a new job as a travel writer and is getting paid $7 millionty to spend their life traveling and writing. Or there's some dude I thought I liked for 2 seconds who appears in his internet life to be happier then me, thus winning the ex-war. Or someone's living in NYC. Or Paris. Or London.

And I'm jealous. And I look around at the life that I normally love and it doesn't look so pretty.

It's like someone's on stage with their fly down. I feel bad but there's nothing I can do to make it stop. So I just keep watching and keep feeling bad.

I love facebook. But facebook sucks.

You know what I'm saying?

Song of the Day: Starry Eyed by Ellie Goulding (Warning: It is impossible to hear this song without wanting to dance around your house.)

Facebook Friends = Real Friends

I have come up with a completely arbitrary measure of friendship that I now use pretty often. I will share it.

In order to determine how good a friend someone is, I simply go to their facebook profile and look for 2 things: 1) Are we actually friends? and 2) Do we have more than 50 mutual facebook friends?

This is fairly foolproof. The first question is important because I have a lot of fb friends that are not my actual friends in real life. I have recently been contemplating going through and unfriending everyone I don't really care about, but then I get too lazy. And I only want to do that if it doesn't notify the people that I've unfriended them.

I think my criteria for unfriending will be as follows: 1) I have not spoken to you either in person or on the phone in over a year, 2) I had to look at your profile to make sure that I actually knew you, 3) I get mad when you take up space on my newsfeed with your worthlessness, and 4) you have more than 1,000 friends.

More than 1,000 friends is completely unnecessary and proves that you are only trying to get a big number, not actually using fb to keep up with people. It's arrogant and weird.

That was what is called a tangent.

Back to my measure of friendship.

So, we are actual friends in real life. And now I see that we have over 50 friends in common. This is pretty arbitrary in some ways, but for the most part I think it shows that someone is really in your life. When I started out in the Canyon, my fellow interns and I only had like maybe 20 common friends. I was just on my friend Sara's profile and I noticed that we now have 74 friends in common.

74 is a big number. That's a lot of people that I love that she loves as well. That's a whole lot of people that are privy to both of our lives.

I like what that says about our friendship. I like that even though we live 2,000 miles apart, there are 74 people that connect us. It makes me feel like that distance is a little smaller.

Even throughout the volatile relationship I have with facebook, in this moment it brings me some comfort. I like that it makes the world a little smaller when people I love are far away.

Thank you, internet.

Song of the Day: Love You Till the End by the Pogues

I'm a Vagabond... A Glamorous One!

Sometimes I get irrationally mad at inanimate objects.  Yesterday was a nail, today is Facebook.  (I've realize after typing this that Facebook isn't really an object but I don't want to get into the existential bullshit that would go with trying to define what "person, place, thing, or idea" category Facebook would go in... You'd have to look at my brother's blog for crap like that.)

The reason I'm mad at Facebook is simple:  I can't get my freaking pictures to upload.  I've read the entire feature article in this week's Newsweek as well as the funny celebrity gossipish page in the back and the book/movie reviews.  This is not a particularly short task, but was all accomplished in the amount of time it took 5 pictures to upload on Facebook.

Honestly, my Newsweek is probably to blame for my disgruntled attitude, but I love it too much to blame it.  Facebook and I have always had a volatile relationship.

The reason Newsweek is breaking my heart is because, even though it's the low, low price of only $20 for an entire year, I can't justify spending any money to renew my subscription.  I'm super broke and don't have a job and am taking a cross country road trip and am moving.  Yeah.  All of those add up to the issue I read today being my last issue of Newsweek for a while.

For those of you who don't know, I've been getting Newsweek since my senior year of high school and for a few years, was getting Time as well.  I don't know why, but I somehow feel better getting my news from a respectable, only slightly obviously biased newsmagazine than any of the crap on TV.  So that means that Newsweek has been in my life longer than most of the people who read this blog.

But sacrifices must be made.  I'm just going to pretend I'm some kind of glamorous vagabond so that I don't get sad or anxious about the fact that I'm broke broke.  (And actually in debt, thank you student loans!)  I'd rather have fun than things.  So Newsweek must go.

Oh, well.  I guess it's back to getting my news from the internet and John Stewart just like everyone else in the world.  Dumb, uninformed and broke, but loving life anyway!  (That's going to be my new motto.  You can use it if you want.)

Sometimes Facebook is Mean

I wish facebook would be a little more judicious with what it puts on my newsfeed. Sometimes it just seems vindictive. There are some things I just don't need to be alerted to. What did I ever do to you, Facebook?

Please excuse me. I have some thumbs-down icons to click on.