The Scrolls

Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

Last Night

Last night was among one of the crazier things I’ve done in my life and, to be honest, it wasn’t that crazy for a lot of people. It was for me, though.

I was a little sad, somewhat annoyed, exhausted and a whole lot of angry. So I did the adult thing, downed an entire bottle of alcohol and posted all my angry, man-hating thoughts for the world to see on Facebook/Twitter.

This is not an apology.

I mean, it was annoying, I can give you that. But I am not sorry. I needed a night to not care. I needed some time to refrain from being the responsible adult. I needed to express anger and I needed to let myself feel sadness and I needed to let it all out — which I pretty much never do.

Luckily, I did so in a pretty entertaining way and no one seems upset with me. In fact, the general consensus is pretty much that I would be a hoot to drink with when, you know, I wasn’t full of angry hate. I think anyone who knows me even moderately understands that I am not that person. I have tried so very hard to be responsible, mindful, positive and strong in the past couple years. I’ve made great strides but sometimes I needed a reminder that I don’t have to be those things all the time.

Last night, I found support from some awesome people, who I would expect to be there, and some awesome people who surprised me by being there. They all surprised me by telling me it was okay for me to feel and act the way I felt and acted because they understood.

I also knew that I would sleep on it and feel better in the morning. Which I did, more or less. Some of the things that set me off didn’t matter in the morning light and some of them are going to make me feel a little blue for a while but none of them are the end of the world or even any worse than anything I’ve had to handle before. And I guess that makes me feel pretty good. Maybe I just needed to check out for a little bit but I’m awesome enough to know how far out I can go and able to reel it back in when I need to.

What happened last night won’t be a regular occurrence, thankfully, but last night needed to happen.

On Facebook and Friends

A while ago, I made a practice of deleting a person a day from my Facebook account. I have a lot of “Friends” there but how many of them are really my friends? Facebook is great because you can look up anyone, everyone that you’ve ever met but that’s sort of its downfall. With MySpace, my friends list was full of bands and people I didn’t know but, hey, at least I could pretend I was using the site because I wanted to get to know them. I make no such claims with Facebook. My Facebook friends list is full of people to whom I never speak, with whom I will never have a conversation again.

Perhaps it started because I simply wanted to have no pending friend requests. Maybe I felt guilty when I didn’t add people but now my friends list is full of people who were my friend eight years ago but one or both of us have changed so much — or stayed so exactly the same — that we could never have a friendship now, if we hadn’t already been friends. And that’s the better of the non-friend Facebook friends. I’ve got a ton of people who went to the same school as me but with whom I never had a single conversation who have tried to add me. I have people who have tried to add me who I’ve felt nothing but disgust for. I have people of whom I have absolutely no recollection.

Sure, people change and, yes, friendships can arise from surprising sources but Facebook isn’t one of those. I don’t talk to these people because of Facebook. It hasn’t facilitated much in the way of connections. It hasn’t rekindled a single friendship that I can think of. In fact, Facebook only connects me to people with whom I’d already be connecting outside of Facebook. It only keeps me up to date with people I’d remember even if there were no Facebook.

So when I say that a friendship a decade ago is not enough to keep you on my friends list. I’m not lying. It’s not. But it’s not unkind, either. We’re not meant to keep in contact with every person we ever met. Trying to do so will only weigh us down, perhaps more-so for those of us with anxiety. The value of our connections is that they are fleeting. They all cannot possibly last forever and, if we’re smart, that motivates us to make the best of that time and to be grateful for it.

WTF Facebook

Lately, I’ve noticed some new behavior from Facebook. Specifically, when I go to post a link as my status or onto a group, it’s not generating the description and title for the specific link but is only showing the URL and description for the domain. When I post links to this site, it doesn’t even show my blog title, just the URL. When I post a URL to a single post on Reviews by Cole, it shows the domain URL — rather than the post itself — and the description I’ve entered into my SEO plugin. But it works just fine with another blog.

Originally, I thought I may have different settings for each blog on my SEO plugin so I’ve updated them to be identical but only the review blog differed anyway. This blog should still show up normally. And, in fact, when I look at the website properties in Firefox, the titles and descriptions are accurate. Facebook also isn’t bringing up all the thumbnails that it should for the review blog. So whatever system Facebook is using is either having trouble finding this information or ignoring it all together and, if that’s the case, why?

I’ve posted links before that worked normally so I don’t understand the change. Boo.

I like some things.. simple

I’ve had a lot of conversations lately about Facebook. When I first joined, I liked it a lot because you were only adding people you actually knew and sometimes catching up with old friends. It was at a time when everyone was becoming disenchanted with MySpace which had become flooded with fake profiles and spam. Profiles were cluttered with apps when they first came out on MySpace but they were never as easy or fun to use as Facebook. People were adding friends simply to up their numbers and while I liked the idea of friending bands or other non-personal pages, I have simply given up on checking my requests.

At one point, I made my profile private which actually increased the invitations from people, bands and groups in which I had absolutely no interest. I guess because they couldn’t see my information, they couldn’t see how there was absolutely no logical reason for us to be “friends.”

Now, Myspace has new profile layouts which I don’t feel one way or another about. They confuse me because I do not spend enough time on Myspace to be used to them and there’s still so much crap from sparkly banners to trivia and online casino apps and it’s literally not worth combing through the clutter to find the people or things which might interest me.

Anyway, it seems like Facebook, which started out as the anti-MySpace in many ways has simply become the same thing and lost its appeal. I have been using it more since the design change but it’s just as frustrating and useless now.

Allergies and Facebook

Don’t worry folks, I’m not allergic to Facebook. In fat, up until now, I’ve never had any allergies whatsoever (besides, maybe Bandaid adhesive) so when I started getting really itchy in my hands and feet and tongue! and swelling and brekaing out in hives and turning red, I didn’t know exactly what was happening or what to do. When the hives started, we headed toward the ER on base but, of course, having some sort of reaction wasn’t enough, no. They had to be doing 100% ID check at the gate and the guy had to be paying enough attention to see that my ID had expired in February so he confiscated.

Good thing you don’t need to show your ID at the hospital, right? Oh, wait! You do! So after we got there and waited, I filled out a bunch of paperwork including an extra paper because I didn’t have a military ID and I went through 4 or 5 other IDs in my purse before finding the one that wasn’t expired. Wouldn’t you know that they’d call me before I was even done with said paperwork. Ugh.

So initially, I talk to someone who gives me some Bendaryl but, by that time, everything was already dying down. They make me wait to see the actual physician and I do, after more than an hour. I was fine and just ready to get checked out by then so she listened to a couple deep breaths and I was out of there. They didn’t even send me home with more Benadryl. As you can see, it was quite the waste of time but now I know should something like this happen in the future.

I mentioned Facebook, right? Well, while I was waiting for the physician, the tech/nurse struck up a conversation with some little girl’s mom because they were both from the same city in Washington. They began talking about some guy they both apparently know (in typical it’s-a-small-world-afterall fashion). Of course, the woman told the tech to look up said mutual acquaintance on Facebook.

This struck me as amusing for two reasons. 1) There’s this automatic assumption that everoyne has Facebook, now. Just a few years ago, no one was on Facebook. Myspace was all the rage. 2) I can almost guarantee I would never run into anyone from my hometown or even relatively close. There’s definitely a tendency for folks from home to go Army or National Guard if they enlist because there’s no Marine, Navy or AF base anywhere in the state. Which kind of makes me sad. I want an it’s-a-small-world-afterall moment. Please?

Anyway, I’m all better now so you can go back to your previously scheduled lives.