One of my friends from high school wrote on her wall that she was disappointed with President Obama because he was wining and dining with Hollywood celebrities while poor people starved. This was the first thing that I read this morning and it ticked me off. I promptly deleted her from my friends and it made me wonder why I even bother with Facebook in the first place. People say really stupid things on there. I also wondered if her breath was still as hideous as it was in high school.
I’ve been ranting about Facebook on and off for the past couple of weeks but I think I have come to the point where I have seriously OD’d on it. Aside from a photo of a 1970 Amana Radarange that another friend shared today, I stared at the stream and wondered why the hell I was wasting the time. It’s kind of like watching TRU-TV’s crap reality shows with people that you allegedly know. It got me to wondering, do I really still ‘know’ people that I went to school with 30 years ago? There’s a few on there that I still enjoy very much, but there’s also a couple that were downright cruel to me during high school and now they want to be “friends”. You scarred me for life, why would I want to continue that sort of frivolity? And yes, being told that “you’ll never fit into society because of your mannerisms” will scar a person for life. You’re lucky I don’t hunt your computer down and put a virus on it.
Now while I’m ranting about Facebook friends, I have to share flipside and say that there are a couple from high school that I have been happy to reconnect with. It was amazing to see a bouquet of flowers from “The Lunch Table Crew” at my father’s services last December. That was a bright spot in a bleak time. I have enjoyed thanking old teachers for helping me even though they didn’t really know they were doing it at the time. I like seeing what former bloggers are up to, those I have met in person and those that we haven’t crossed paths with yet and only met electronically. With the decline of personal blogs and the tendencies for folks to microblog in its place, you have to kind of be on Facebook if you want to stay connected with those folks you knew from the ’00s. But for the most part, the platform seriously pisses me off.
I think I need to cut my Facebook consumption by 9/10ths and seriously prune my friends list down in the process. This might make things more manageable and less irritating.
But I’m seriously keeping the friend with the cool Radarange.
Amen. I’ve pruned a bunch of people as of late. And if it weren’t for a few former bloggers out there, I don’t know that I’d keep the FB at all. I have to say that the biggest reason I’ve kept it was because of my business, but I think maybe it’s time to create a “business only” FB account [that I’ll rarely use], and maybe nuke my primary account. Or at least whittle it down to people I care about… like you!
I started the whittling down process yesterday evening. I’m probably not going to earn any awards for “friendliest classmate” at the next high school reunion, but then again, I don’t know that I’ll go anyways.