Facebook Feed Me

As per my job description, I spend an inordinate amount of time on Facebook, absorbing the latest trends in social media. I'm also taking a close look at the personal lives of many people I'm surprised I'm even friends with. Said perusing has led me to a startling revelation: I have no life.

This is, of course, merely relevant if you define your life based on a.) being so freaking cool you spit Popsicles, b.) spend your evenings attending event after event after event or c.) know lots of super neat people and take oodles of pictures with them. And I am none of these things.

Living in New York has turned me cynical; I revel in the fact that I do attend a great deal of food related night time extravaganzas (as press, sure, but yeah) and have met no shortage of famous chefs/mixologists, had enough cocktails to quench the thirst of Beijing and eaten delicacies above and beyond epic. I don't always advertise it. Perhaps out of laziness but mostly just because I enjoy it on a level that is purely my own.

That being said, I work very, very hard at what I do with no shortage of extra bondage taped on at the end of the night after I've consumed a hastily slapped together meal. I'm tired, people. My mother thinks I have an ulcer. I am not meant for a stressful life. Truthfully, I just want to open a used bookstore in the middle of nowhere and raise a brat or two. It's better than spending half my life reading/visualizing the lives of people who don't exist in my outside social realm.

I have been toying over the idea that Facebook is merely a sounding board for good intentions; those that want to seem important or interesting will retain the bad and bask in the glory of their decent, fully functional ridiculousness through pictures, quirky comments and odd, yet hilarious, "likes".

For example, as I'm watching Buffy in my pjs, Dim Sum stuffed in my mouth, I notice on Erik's laptop that my feed is being bombarded by pictures of friends at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic. Or talking about something in the New York Times. Or tweeting about the coolest ever techy stuff that they obviously have a "very funny" pun about.

And here's the double sided sword: if I complain that it's just a stupid, vapid way of gaining attention, I will receive responses of "turn of the #@!(%&* computer". But if I keep quiet, I'll only wallow in the self-misery of the humble. And god knows that'll probably give me an ulcer, too. Only one way to find out...