Just a quick note to say:
Make a Long Story Short is on Facebook! (Or as we call it in our house, for reasons unknown, Faceybook or the Book of Face.)
Come on over and ‘like’ the page for updates and discussion. And tell everyone you know. Every time you ‘like’ our page, a cookie gets its chocolate chips.
I know, I know: how touching is that?
I now have to make brownies in RECORD TIME and cannot eat any of them, so I’ll be back later.
Have a good Wednesday!
Can you spot it?
I deleted my Facebook app yesterday and verily, it was like chipping a hole from my heart. Oh ok, it wasn’t. But I had to do it: every now and again I get to a stage where I can’t not check it. The habit of flicking in and out of it becomes so ingrained in my fingers that I do it without thinking. I don’t even like it much, but I’ve felt twitchily bereft since I got rid of it. What if there are notifications I’m not picking up? What do I do with myself while baby feeding? I’ve been like a crack addict in a nunnery, and this disturbs me. Oh Facebook, I wish I could quit you. Thank goodness I’ve still got Instagram.
I dislike being tied to anything inanimate, particularly something that involves so many details of other people’s bodily functions, so when I get to this point I go on a week-long Facebook fast. Like a detox, only with fewer vegetables. But also fewer Farmville invites, so there’s a win. (I know you’re probably reading this from a Facebook link; those are generated automatically, honest.)
I read a fascinating blog post the other day about how we learn to crave electronic information. Our brains create new pathways to process the flood of notifications and updates, and if those pathways are frequently used, we begin to want more and more of the same. I thought it might be good for me to clear a bit of space in my head for a week. I feel terribly hair-shirted and virtuous. Even though I’ve still got Instagram.
In other news (!):
This is as far as he’s willing to go to get a toy he can’t reach. Bottom in the air, face pressed dramatically into the blanket. O Mother, I am fortune’s fool. Is it even so? Then I defy you, stars! Etc.
But one day, sort-of soon, it might be a crawl.
Yeah, keep hoping.
I can never resist a blank slate.
All that lovely time and space to make things better in. I always get carried away and make far too many new year’s resolutions to ever keep up with.
This year, I decided to simplify. My new year’s resolution for 2012 can be summed up in the following thought I had while restless and frustrated one colicky morning:
It took me a little while to work out what I meant, but I’ve got it now. I want to spend more of my time doing things that matter. Life with a baby means pockets of time, not the acres of unbroken hours I envisioned. Thus far, I’ve been pretty awful at using my hour or two for something of significance. I fritter it. I fiddle, and ramble around on the internet doing pointless things. And before I know it, it’s time to feed again and I’m sat down for another hour. I’ve spent entire days, weeks even, doing nothing that means anything. Skimming on the surface. It’s not fulfilling. (I do, of course, know that baby feeding is something of significance – I can just do better with what surrounds it.)
‘Things that matter’ range from reading to Henry, to improving my writing, to visiting those I’m assigned and those I’m not, to getting back on the piano, to learning how to use my slow cooker, to putting away everything to talk to Timothy when he gets home, to doing some proper exercise, with baby in tow or not, and making my excitable way through these:
I just want to make more of my hours count for something. Because we’re all the sum of our parts, and I’d like to be made of a bit less Facebook. Doing things of significance makes you a person of significance, and that’s the end of it.
Go on. Ring out the old. Ring in the new. (Do you love that new year hymn? I do. I love it even more now I know it was written by Tennyson.) Take your blank slate and scribble all over it. January’s a good time for that sort of thing.
What follows is a wondering about apricots.
I have recently made a switch from dried bananas to dried apricots in the difficult hour where breakfast has been digested but it’s too early for rice cakes (gag). Banana chips are mostly tasteless, always come in shapes too awkward for a human mouth, and are so hard that everyone within a ten-metre radius can hear my endless crunching. Apricots are a nice change, but confuse me.
In other news, I saw someone on Facebook today saying they hated sunny days in February. I wanted to add a comment underneath along the lines of ‘What kind of WEIRDO hates sunny days in February?’, but I didn’t know the person so I thought it might be rude. In other other news, I just read Room by Emma Donaghue and it was wonderfully good. I read it in two sittings, and wouldn’t mind reading it again straight away, and you know the only other books of which that is true are Wolf Hall and Goodnight Mister Tom, so that’s pretty elevated company.
Trust Facebook to make the best of a bad situation.
(‘Like’?!)
An ad I found on my Facebook profile this morning:
First of all, if this is Facebook’s version of targeted advertising, then they need better algorithms. Most of the people I know well enough to buy Christmas presents for don’t drink.
Second, I’m curious about the logic behind this marketing strategy. What is this mysterious item your man would want for Christmas that you can never, ever provide for him? And why are the makers of the brew-your-own-beer kit suggesting their product would only be an acceptable, but never truly fulfilling, substitute?
Hey Facebook users, your relationship might suck, but nothing says love like a brew-your-own-beer kit to drown your sorrows on Christmas day. All for only £24. And they give you an option to ‘Like’!
What a tragic story.
I think I might actually be nearing the end of my rag with Facebook. I’ve stuck with the world-conquering super-network since its early, grimy days as a university-only messaging service, where the novelty of gawking at other people’s drunken photographs and thinking up ‘Rachel is’ statements was all thrilling and edgy. It was like MySpace, but for grownups. Well, now it’s like MySpace, for every tweenage idiot on the planet, and every single one of them wants you to know, yes you, right now, what angel job they’d be given in heaven, what mathematical vector they’d be if being mathematical vectors was allowed, and, especially, which boy in the Twilight series is their Dream Date.
And if you’re not taking these quizzes (and if not, why the cheff not?) you’re broadcasting your most personal, uncomfortable thoughts all over the status page. It used to be the case that in the throes of your melodramatic teenage angst, you’d scrawl it all in your journal to feel heartily embarrassed about later, or you’d write a heartbroken/soul searching song with lots of diminished seventh chords, or you’d just buy lots of black clothes and spend your evenings wondering why No one Understands You. This is all fine and dandy, and is a rite of passage as a teenager. As a species we concentrate all our ridiculousness into six years, so we can be relatively normal for the rest of it. Unfortunately, one person’s melodrama is another’s really boring drivel. And thanks to the Book of Face, now every single one of your online ‘friends’ (whether actual friends or friends of friends or people you think might make your friends page look cooler) can read all about every one of your ‘So-and-so wonders when life will get better for me enough already!!!!lol’ days. And if that includes me, consider me thrilled. Especially by the mixed third/first person sentences; I love those.
Of course, I’m well aware of the hypocrisy of this rant, because I’m not about to deactivate my Facebook account. I can reel off this argument because I’ve already gone over it several times to myself. It serves a practical purpose (family abroad; can keep up with their news and photographs without having to be intrusive or rack up huge phone bills). It allows you to Facebook-stalk old high school classmates, to see – let’s face it – if they’re married, having kids or have put on shedloads of weight. And there’s an undeniable little frisson of excitement to be gained when your status update or photo album attracts a flurry of comments. This is what worries me though: that this determination to relay every, tiny, intimate detail of your day, no matter how boring and/or inappropriate, is sort of…egotistical. Because, really, every time you tell that inviting little blue box that you’ve got a urinary tract infection (a real example, though I wish it weren’t), you’re assuming that your 371 friends (plus any number of their friends, if they comment on it) would be edified by that information. And you were so convinced of the worldwide importance of your bodily function news that you needed to publish it immediately on a public forum. I saw a status update on someone else’s computer the other day, sent while the person was in labour. Important news, undeniably. But isn’t the fact that you’re birthing a child more important than updating your Facebook page? Was it absolutely necessary to stop, mid-contraction, to type it in and press ‘send’?
I just found out that, unless you stumble across a tiny little tickbox on a forgotten settings page, your Facebook photos and details can be used to create ‘Facebook Ads’ for your friends. Basically Zuckerberg can appropriate your face in order to sell stuff to people, based on what you’ve put in your profile. I worked up a little energy and was shocked, and opted out. But honestly, I can’t see many people minding too much. Not when it means more people get to see your status updates and be reminded what a cool, hilarious person you are, right? Why should the site be bothered about privacy rules when none of its 250 million users are? It seems that while Facebook used to record people’s lives after the event, now it informs and influences the event itself. Your day doesn’t exist if Facebook doesn’t know about it, so take another moody-looking photograph and stick it on your wall.
make a long story short 