Real Life Advice Day 1 – The Facebook Womb: Life Outside The Computer Still Needs Tending To.

The more Facebook ‘friends’ you have, the more you’ll be offered. This morning, with 3400 friends, I have 23 requests from those waiting for me to friend them and thus draw ever closer to the magic cut-off number, 5000. Lessee, that’s only 1600 more slots to fill unless I start deleting previous ‘friends’ in earnest.
Right now I am only adding authors that look intriguing, literary groups or publishers. Adding slowly. Adding ‘friends’ just gets easier and easier. Someone wants me to friend them who says we have something like 1900 ‘friends’ in common. 364 is usual. Hardly ever do we have no ‘friend’ connections at all. It is as though Facebook is trying to push you towards the magic number despite all you do to resist.
I caught myself the other day, yawning and automatically turning to the computer and booting up Facebook. Uh oh!
When your real life is boring, messy, painful, booting up and turning to Facebook just exaggerates the condition. When you get, at long last, BACK to Real Life, things seem worse. Often things ARE worse due to your neglecting to do anything about them while you crawled into the Facebook womb.
When you realize that a simple switch turned off would make all that imagined comfort and nuturing just vanish, you begin to get a perspective on how much meaning is really on Facebook. What you are receivinng on your site and pages is information. Some of it is useful when applied to what you already know. But spending time there is like sitting in your car with the motor running, maybe even your radio playing a great song. You can’t do that forever. You’ll run out of gas.
So once again, what IS Facebook? It was a need that something could fill, a lack of connection with community. And so some entrepreneurs created a fake way to convince everyone sitting around on their hands that there was a real world inside their computers in which they could spend hours, where everyone said nice things to them and about them, (except when they didn’t), where they could post great photoshopped pictures of themselves and be as witty and charming as they never are in real life and they could do this the rest of their days, wake up every morning and dive into that soft, sweet life where anyone who was not their friend could be deleted.
The real world with its edginess and lack of ability to control, even with all your imagined billions from giving and receiving Facebook ‘gifts,’ is more fascinating when you got off the narrow online situation and see who, what and where you are in time and space. Facebook DOES foster such an appreciation, if you ever lean away from the keyboard for a moment and look out the window.
I am typing this with frozen fingers on Mother’s Day. It is not snowing outside but the weather is conducive. Yesterday I planted pansies in the two cement bowls outside my front step. The Bergamont-Mendara-Beebaum is coming up despite the blasting winter chill and them uncovered. Today I hope to sprinkle sheep manure and such around the garden and throw in zinnia seeds all over to mingle with the cosmos (such an apt flower name, eh? Looks like the universal flower for all time, actually a flower symbol, ala Disney), as these hardies oughta last through several frosts till winter to come. Colour and movement, that’s what I’m looking for in the garden and these two never disappoint.
Out there real life is happening. Whoops, the furnace just came on and since it’s turned down to about 50, that says it is cold, leave the keyboard, take a look outside.
The best thing of all is that it IS Mother’s Day morning shortly after 8AM and Nobody Yet Has Come Along With A Child Or Two To Swipe the Scarlet Tulips With Yellow Centres to take home for their mothers. There is a guy who regularly does but perhaps he remembers my offer to give him free seeds instead.
A woman with a baby carriage for years used to trot along with her trowel and dig up any plants that specially appealed to her and SHE’S not come along either. Good news! Great Day!