The Facebook Diet: Day 3

Alright, yesterday was a bump in the road. We're fine today. In fact, the number of times I thought about facebook lessened. I'm pretty sure that's true. There's no way to prove that's correct. But at least I didn't feel as down as I did yesterday.

Here's what I noticed. I rely on facebook to let everyone in on my thoughts at different points of the day. Instead of thinking, "Gee, I should text/call SOMEONE about this...", I instantly think, "Oh man. I have to post that on my status.

Here are the random things I wanted to update my status with:

I'm at the mall. If I were a guy all alone watching the kids play in the play area, I'd be way creepy right now."

I'm watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire! Harry Potter marathon this weekend!

There are a bunch of sales at the mall today. Is that why it's claustrophobically busy? Or maybe I just haven't gone to the mall on the weekend for a while.

YES! Thanksgiving tips and meals on Food Network is back!

Google "Kelly Pickler" and "Ellen". You will laugh your arse off.

Officially a Miranda Lambert fan.

So yeah, there you go. Random thoughts I'd rather not text or call someone to say.

Mood: A bit relieved, unconcerned, sleepy

Closest "falling off the wagon" moment: There wasn't one. My mom kept asking me to get on facebook to see if my sister in law posted new pictures and I had to explain to her what my "facebook diet" was and why I wouldn't get on. That was as interesting as it got.

Most difficult: Nothing was extremely difficult. I just hope no one contacted me on facebook about hanging out.

What I learned: I have a lot of stupid, random thoughts that I'd like everyone to know. What do I do with those stupid, random thoughts now? Should I record them and lay them out in a barrage of updates when I go back to facebook? Or just let them die and fly to stupid, random thoughts heaven?

Goodnight. Go towards the light, my stupid, random thoughts.

The Facebook Diet: Day 2

Call it a sophomore slump, the facebook hangover, or the first signs of facebook abandoner's remorse, but today was harder than yesterday. Once the glitz and glamour of resisting the urge to visit facebook wore off -and today was that was today-I felt lonely.

I know. It sounds sad. But the feeling was akin to sitting at a restaurant by yourself, as I would imagine it to be. You feel like someone's supposed to join you, or you're waiting for someone, and no one shows up. You're pretty sure that you can find someone to join you, but you've already decided to go it alone. You just keep forgetting that you've made that decision.

I couldn't figure out if I was stressing from the worry that I might accidentally visit facebook, or if I was stressing from the lack of communication. Yikes.

Mood: Stressed and lonely


Closest "falling off the wagon" moment: It happened again! Around 5 pm, my fingers typed in the letters f-a-c-e-b-o-o-k  on their own and I almost went there. I quickly stopped my ipod from loading. But it wasn't funny today.

Most difficult: I felt like I should be recieving more texts or calls. But it was pretty slow today. Talk about a wake up call.

What I learned: I rely too much on facebook for connection with my friends. Without the comfort of facebook, I felt disconnected from everyone. Did I miss an invite? Did I miss a long, legendary, status chain of comments? Are people planning something? Did anyone miss me? This is not a good feeling. Maybe I'll text-harass everyone tomorrow.

The Facebook Diet: Day 1

Today wasn't so bad. Being at work for the better part of the day made avoiding facebook easy. I took my lap-top with me so I could blog, and I'm proud to say that I successfully resisted the urge to peek on facebook.

The difficulty of avoiding facebook came once the evening arrived. By 4:57 pm (not that I was checking or anything), I noticed an unusual hike in my need for a facebook fix. At one point I intended to type in a website address that has nothing to do with facebook. I swear to you that my fingers, at their own accord, took me to facebook.com.

dum dum dummmmmmmm .......

Luckily, I was prepared for such a situation and had officially signed out of facebook yesterday to avoid going straight into my home page through accident or break down. I found myself at the sign in page. Finding yourself at the sign-in page of a website you're trying to avoid but cannot because your fingers have the urge to go there anyway is actually funny (which is why I laughed out loud). But it also taught me how determined and obliging my fingers are to type the letters f-a-c-e-b-o-o-k regardless of my intent. Scary.

Mood: Proud

Closest "falling off the wagon" moment: Around 5 pm, when my fingers took me to the site. I felt like I should've visited facebook 4-5 times at this point. Thank you Grilled Cheesus-I was signed out.

Most difficult: To avoid the urge to open and read my notifications in my AOL mailbox. But I did it. I want to do this cleanly. Reading everything people are writing to me on facebook would be cheating, me thinks.

What I learned: It felt good not visiting facebook today. Instead of being disappointed in missing the new posted photos or fun status updates, I was more relieved I didn't have to see so many of my stressors. Interesting. We'll see how well this holds up tomorrow.

The Facebook Diet

Everything in moderation, right?

Facebook entered our lives only a few short years ago, but it seems that it's become such an indelible part of our lives that we can barely remember life before it.

I remember the first time I was introduced to it by a friend of mine who already had an account. It started out as a fun, unprecedented way of checking up on your former school mates and eventually some newer ones.

As we scrolled through her facebook friends, I marvelled at the ones who seemed so successful so soon, was genuinely happy to check up on a few who I hadn't heard from for a few years, but was even more fascinated by the others whose lives and images seemed so different than what we came to know them as in high school.

In the beginning, facebook was special because it was both exclusive and connective. Only a select number of college email accounts were recognized for you to create your own facebook page. Then you could request to be a part of the lives of people who you used to see every day. These were people who were such a big part of your formative years, for better or worse.

Then somewhere along the way, the exclusivity vanished and I started recieving requests from people I didn't know. I used to only have to worry about whether I should remember you, now I had to worry about whether or not I ever met you...

...or if I should accept you because you're a friend of a friend of a friend

...or if I should accept you because the consequence of not accepting you would mean you hating me until the end of time, even though we didn't know each other that well and we could potentially be friends in the future. I know. So complex. (For the record, my facebook policy is: if I don't know you, you aren't my facebook friend.That's right-I had to create a policy.)

Then something that should've been predictable happened. Oversaturating myself with my connections became emotionally taxing. My curiousity became a curse. I wanted to hear what everyone was up to, but hearing what everyone was up to became a stressor.

Don't get me wrong, there are great qualities to facebook. There are friends and family who live in different cities and different parts of the world that I can keep in touch with. What's not to love about that? It was impossible to keep up with them before, unless you liked spending time on the phone or emailing. But anyone who knows me knows that I'm one of those people who doesn't like spending time on the phone. At all. And emailing seems too formal. I hate the generic emails in which I ask, "Hi! How are you? Tell me about yourself and what's happening in your life," over and over. It feels worse when you don't really have anything to reply.

Facebook allows us to stay connected to issues both domestic and foreign. I like hearing about issues my friends are passionate about, the ways they are affected first hand or the interesting reads they suggest. Facebook also gives us the opportunity to stay informally but emotionally connected, whether that's through the posted pictures, funny videos or songs we love.

But let's get real here. There's a lot of grandstanding. We've all been guilty of it to a certain extent. It feels like, at times, we can become self promoters with our own lives being the products. I'm not going to lie. It can be fun. But it can also be bad, because too much of anything is bad.

While we can usually quantify the effects of, say, over-eating through weight, it seems less obvious the effects of facebook. I can only describe some of the negative side effects as envy, stress, annoyance, ridicule, and anxiety.

Facebook has become sort of an addiction. Anyone regularly and willingly subjecting themselves to those negative side effects is either crazy or addicted. So the healthy solution is to scale back my facebooking.

Yesterday I decided to go on a facebook diet. I'm starting small: Seven days. But give me credit. In facebook time, seven days is like seven weeks. There will be so much up-to-the-minute information that I'll miss! But I believe it's for the best. I will not go on facebook.com. I will not open my aol notifications from facebook. (I've already started saving them in a folder to open and devour when I am officially off the diet.)

For seven days I'll attempt to document the phases of my withdrawal and its effect on my life. If I go into cold sweats or start vomiting- you'll know. If my body start twitching as I go through large amounts of pain, or experience hallucinations like demons being exorcised from my body- you'll know that too. I really hope those things don't happen, though. Wish me luck!

To Forgive is Not to Forget

I've been thinking a lot about the idea of forgiveness lately.

It's one of the hardest thing a person can do---to forgive. It's not just about pride, it's about trying to prevent a wrong from being committed...again. It's about having self esteem and not allowing someone to bring it down. It's about laying down boundaries and telling someone "You can't cross this one."

The "F" word is a tricky deal, especially when forgiveness pertains to friendship. You make a bargain with someone, trade some trust with the understanding that we will both value and handle it with care. Trust just happens to be the most fragile of valuables. We throw it back and forth until someone drops it, and then we wonder why we were so quick to toss it in the first place.

It is strange how the inner turmoil you tackle with before you reach forgiveness does not come with an expiration date. It takes its own time. You can't just snap your fingers and forgive, just like you can't just snap your fingers and trust. I only know that the deepest of broken trusts, like the deepest of scars, never actually fade. They're there as a reminder to teach you what your mind, like your body, can handle.

Yet, as soon as we're ready to forgive, a weight is lifted because we don't forgive for them, we forgive for ourselves. Still, we can never go back to square one thanks to a little thing called memory. As long as we have it, we never go back to the beginning. Life doesn't have one big rewind button. (But wouldn't it be great if it did?)

Even though we forgive at our own pace, apologies makes a big difference. Sometimes who tells you sorry-and means it-gives you this newfound option of forgiving sooner than later. They are telling you that you can rid of this pain now. Forgiveness doesn't mean you forget what they've done. It doesn't mean you give them an easy out or excuse their behavior. It only means you won't be held prisoner to their action anymore.

Look, I'm not saying that everyone deserves forgiveness or that people who can't forgive are necessarily wrong. I often wonder about people who are thrust into terrible situations and find the ability to forgive. I don't know if I'd be able to do that. I hope I never have to make that decision. But from sample size, I know that carrying around the burdon of their actions isn't yours to carry.

Think of your emotions like a meteorology report. Anger clouds your judgement. Your life becomes a stormy mess and it's up to you to pick up the debris left behind and clear away the mess. If you choose to forgive, don't forget what happened and ignore the warnings. Just move forward, keep your inner doplar on storm watch and enjoy the sunny days ahead.

What 20 Innings Will Teach You

With the Cards losing to the Mets, 2-1 in...get this... a 20 inning game, we learned a few things-

1. Lopez is all around entertaining:

Ladies and gentleman- he fields, he hits grand slams and now we know he can pitch a scoreless inning during a 20 inning marathon.

2. The longer a game lasts, the harder it is to leave:

I couldn't do anything else. Especially after the 11th inning. Not that I don't usually ignore things around me during Cards games, but this game left me alone in my house-in the dark-and refusing to communicate with anyone through anything more than a text.

3. The Mets really didn't want to win:

I know you're thinking, "But they won! The Cards lost!" Perhaps we should rewind to the ...18th inning (?), when LaRussa pretty much conceded the game by throwing utility guys Felipe Lopez, and in the two subsequent innings, Joe Mather, out on to the mound to play the role of pitcher. Why didn't the Mets score, like, eight runs?

Not to play "Mean Girl", but do they really like us or something? I know you will counter with the argument that the Cardinals didn't really seem to want to win either, but I have a theory. We'll get there. Just a few more...

4. Lopez and Mather take "utility" to a whole new level:

They will do anything. Let's see what else we can make them do!

5. Some people are too lazy to leave their nosebleed seats and move down to the luxury seats:

In one of the latter innings, the Fox camera was focused on one fan, then slowly panned out to show him sitting in the third upper deck all alone. Why are you so lazy and sad, drama queen?

6. McCarver becomes funny when the game gets too long:

I was annoyed with him in the beginning, as usual. He talked about Garcia's no-hitter from the third inning on. He kept saying things like, "This player NEVER..." and "This player ALWAYS..." as if to purposefully jinx them. Then, somewhere around the 14th inning, he became funny. Or maybe I got delirious.

7. We get geeky when they get human:

Nerd Alert! Every Cardinal fan I've talked to thus far cannot stop geeking-out over the inning Lopez pitched. We find it highly amusing and humorous that Lopez and other players (Like Wainwright! And Pujols!) were also cracking up at the situation. Call it infectious joy.

They usually spend a lot of time masking their emotions. It gets boring listening to the usual cliched remarks after every game. That was some real emotion in an unreal situation. And we loved it.

And how about a theory:

In the spirit of the final season of the epically awesome series Lost and Doc Jensen's lengthy, baffling, and "out-there" theories featured at ew.com, I couldn't help but come up with an explanation for this *illogical game.

*Illogical because we could not, for the life of us, score a run---even with our runners at second and third with NO OUTS in the 14th. Not a characteristic of a LaRussa team!

It may be crazy, but I couldn't shake the feeling that the Cardinals were stuck in a limbo world. It was almost like purgatory. It was as if the baseball powers were telling us,

"Big Mac as hitting coach? Not without a price! You must remain in this game against the only other team that will not score, the Mets (who are apparently on their way to Hell). Once you have suffered through the imposed penance and atoned for this sin, we will re-evaluate."

Yes. I was thinking this during the game. Hey, it was 20 innings long. Do you blame me?

When I Was Your Age...

There's a universal truth that people don't tell you, but you eventually realize for yourself. As you age, you start to become your parents. They told their stories about walking through the snow and we'd roll our eyes so many times, only people possessed by demons could rival us. But they were trying to push whatever point they were making across...usually when we were whining and complaining that we were victims of some unjust universe that chose us as the first group to torture in the history of mankind (prophets and minorities aside). I'm quite sure that when they were teenagers, they complained about the unfairness of some situation and their parents told them something about how they had to hunt for their food or flipped a coin for who'd be able to eat that day. You know, the usual.

You can probably FEEL yourself aging---not necessarily by the number of birthdays one celebrates, but by the number of things you vowed you'd never eat, do, or say... that you're now eating, doing, and saying. If you want to get a two hour explanation about how life generally works, pop The Lion King into the DVD player. Hummy yana, hummy hummy yanna..It's the circle of life....and it moves us all....

It's all very freaky. For the love of God, I want less frosting on my cake! If I told 10 year old me that in 16 years I'd take frosting OFF my cake, I wouldn't have believed older me and, again, just rolled my eyes-because at that age, rolling your eyes is one of the staples of being rebellious and yet the least rebellious way of showing your distaste for something.

But the kids these days-they don't appreciate anything! Yeah, mom and dad say that. Grandma and Grandpa say that. And now I'm saying it.

Everything is so instantaneous. They need to watch movies... in their cars...NOW. They can't wait until they get home...The Incredibles cannot wait! When driving behind some mini-van, I still find myself mesmerized, my eyes fixed on the glowing TV screen in front of me, and I think, "you stupid spoiled brats!" Probably the same thing old people said the first time they saw kids riding in a car instead of a carriage.

If their eyes aren't entertained at all times, then their ears need to be. These kids need to carry around 1,000 songs at all times. I mean, I get why they need it. Who knows if they'll need to alienate themselves from the world at a moment's notice.

Also, seriously, why does a 10 year old need a cell phone? Where is your child meandering about that they need to have you on-call to pick them up? And where are they going where there are no operable telephones or another adult's cellphone to call you from?

Truth be told, I'm jealous. I could've used portable DVD players on those car rides, alienated myself even further with IPods and I promise you I would've avoided the most unnecessary situations ever if I just had a damn cell phone in the vicinity when I was growing up. I'm sure it would've made my parents' lives a lot easier too. But I'm getting older and I have to point out the things I didn't have and the things I had to do to get by. This is the way of life (Hummy yanna, hummy hummy yanna). When these kids are older, they'll probably lament about how when they were younger, they had to drive to school instead of fly. They'll complain about how they had to watch T.V. instead of absorbing it. They'll probably tell their younger cousins about how they wore regular clothes instead of temperature controlled space suits or something.

Let the eye rolling begin! I want to tell these kids that we used to huddle around a gas heater and complain about who was taking up the most heat. You could probably tell who was abusing the heater space by the number of charred holes in their clothing. Our cat wasn't immune either. I don't know how many times I had to put out Kitty's tail. "Kitty!" I'd scream. "Your tail's on firrrrre!" (because you talk to your pet, like a member of the family, even though I'm pretty sure I've never said the words "Sho Sho! Your tail's on fire!") By the way, the cat didn't care. He just wanted warmth as much as the rest of us (which proved he was really one of us). It was damn cold, for sure.

When I was younger, we didn't always have heated water. Mom used to have to heat up the water over the stove and then pour it over our heads! Then we'd curse the country as we huddled by the gas heater, shivering from cold and anger. Heck, we didn't always have water! "No water today!?" one of us would ask in exasperation. "Damn those Israelis and their damn swimming pools" another would add, almost matter of factly.

Go ahead, ask me how much lunch money we took to school. First of all, lunch money wasn't always a given. But when we did get it, we'd be lucky if we had a shekel and a half, the equivalent of 45 cents at the time. We'd feel like we were oil tycoons if we got two and a half shekels. When we did get to the "lunch room", we had to fight for lunch. We'd be lucky if we got our lunch in time. Let me describe the jungle known as the lunch room. The lunch room looked like the commodities and futures trading pits of the NYSE. Or perhaps you've seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off? The scene where all the stock exchange dudes are screaming and gesturing their hands is pretty much what our lunch room looked like. It was survival of the fittest. Only the people who fought the hardest ate. Part of the challenge was getting the cafeteria man's attention. The other challenge was convincing them you already gave them your lunch money but they still hadn't given you your lunch. If you ordered something that they cooked there, you ran the risk of eating something that wasn't fully cooked. I sometimes gave away my pizza when the dough wasn't cooked. I tried to usually soldier through it, but sometimes I just couldn't eat uncooked dough (call me a spoiled little American). It was generally safer to eat something that was pre-packaged, like a candy bar. Of course, pre-packaged items weren't always danger proof. I once made the mistake of ordering a fruit drink that was expired and that the government had warned us not to drink. But I was a kid and I trusted that the fruit drink at school would be safe, even though mom also warned us. Ok, that's a lie. I knew the school I went to wouldn't put our safety first, but I was thirsty! And I only had a half shekel left, which was only enough to buy a Fruity! Needless to say, I had to stay home from school for a week due to food poisoning. You hear that, kids!? I was poisoned! So don't say your lunch food is like poison unless you are literally poisoned!

But that's neither here nor there. Part of accepting "the circle of life" is realizing the people before you always had it worse. No matter how cold you were, how thirsty you were or how food poisoned you were, the people before you walked barefoot in the snow, didn't try water until they were 8 and were lucky if they had cooked meat once a year. Just let them complain, so that when you're their age, you can return the favor to these spoiled little brats when they grow up and realize they've become their own parents.

Till we find our place...On the path unwinding...In the Circle....The Circle of Life!