Farewell Facebook-well for now

    
      So I did it, I went off Facebook cold turkey.  I honestly feel like I'm trying to quit smoking.  I've been trying to find ways of cutting back my usage for a few months now.  I tried the Facebook cleanse-but like all diets, I was as good as gold for the morning but by afternoon found myself tired of celery and back in the fridge shoveling cake into my face (or in this case, I wouldn't be on Facebook all day and then killed 3 hours on it at night).  I had a brilliant plan of slowly cutting back my friends list, only keeping the people I interact with online (or they lived far away making offline communication difficult) until eventually I wouldn't feel the need to check my phone every 2 minutes, you know, in case someone mentioned me in a post.  In my hormone soaked brain this seemed like a completely logical idea-until I started deleting people from my list.  I put out a Facebook "warning" but started trimming my list immediately with the same tack as lopping off limbs and then was shocked at the backlash.  I forgot how seriously we all take Facebook-I got a bunch of angry messages, it wasn't like I was un-friending them in REAL life.  If they still wanted to they could phone me and vice versa, however I guess I wasn't sensitive enough, next time I'll mail out a Facebook spring cleaning notification 2weeks in advance.  To be honest even on Facebook where you're not anonymous as say a forum, people can be still be downright nasty online saying things that they would never say to your face, I won't repeat what people said to me to tell me off-maybe we're all a little discontent on the evolution of friendship social media is driving us towards.  However I'm not one for deep thought, so if you are, feel free to take that thought and run with it.  To make a long story short I had a huge cyber temper tantrum and deactivated my account.  I sort of regret it, but I'm too embarrassed to cave after ONE (not even that) day.  Plus I would still be in the same boat as yesterday-overly addicted to Facebook and still having to clean up my friends list.  The draw back to not having Facebook is that I have no idea what day it is or what the weather is like now.  I also don't know if the end of the world happened.  Honestly when I went to bed last night I had no idea if I would still exist when I woke up in the morning. It's weird I woke up today at my usual time and first thing I did was reach for my phone to check what happened last night in my beloved virtual world.  I was saddened when I realized the app was no longer there-now what am I suppose to use this device for?? Oh yeah, maybe dialing someone's number....

Reasons to quit

• I am addicted.  I realized this last year when I clued in that I was checking Facebook on my mobile phone while surfing Facebook on my computer.
• It was making me socially lazy.  Instead of meeting up with people or phoning I was liking statuses and counting that as social maintenance.  
• Too easy to be too personal.  Sure you start off just saying vague thing but next thing you know you've slowly gotten to the point where you're posting your BM schedule.  

Things I miss

• The convenience of knowing everything about everyone.
• Stalking Exes (friends and boyfriends) to make sure they have gotten more fatter, miserable and uglier than me.
• saturating people's newsfeed with pictures of Lily and myself.
• The shamelessness of posting stuff all about me without looking as vapid as if I was telling people the same thing over coffee.
• Pretending I'm the guardian guy on the Matrix.  
• Feeling popular, hey! i got 250 friends!

Excuses to rejoin-I'm jonesing for a status update, I'm a proud person and don't want to go crawling back.  However I'm getting the shakes.

• Pregnancy hormones.  When in doubt, these wonderful hormones can be used to justify every social "oops" or dumb thing I do.  
• Hand slipped-I was trying to like a status but my hand slipped and I deactivated instead.

I'm not completely off the grid-I haven't gone hippy.  I still have a bit of an virtual presence.  I still have my twitter account-yes I know that's like trading heroin for crack but baby steps people!  I'm also going to keep up on this blog so people can still have get an idea what I'm up to without being force feed it via a newsfeed.

So let's hope I make it more than a week.  I've got $2 on making it through the week.

UPDATE:  I briefly logged in this morning, I wanted to see if I could amend my account or get pictures without having an active session-turns out you can't.  I guess I owe Dave $2.00