Breaking Up with Facebook

During Mardi Gras break of my junior year of college I was meandering down a street in the French Quater vastly underdressed for the weather and ran into one of my friends from high school. I'm sure we talked for a few minutes or so, but all I remember was her telling me to "facebook" her. I was pretty drunk and hadn't heard of facebook--this was like 6mos to a year after Zuckerberg had his techie aha moment in his dorm and facebook was only available on a few campuses then--so I dismissed what she told me until another friend later that night said the same thing. A few days later I Googled facebook, saw that LSU was indeed on the cool list and made my page. The snarky girl inside of me fell instantly in love with this online gossip mill that connected me to people I knew, kinda knew, wanted to know and had no inclination to get to know. Fast forward a couple of years and that same need to know has me wanting to run screaming from the site.

Just like any relationship, my relationship with facebook started out innocent enough and full of time spent swooning over the pages--and getting mine down to a science--when I should have been paying attention in class. Before high schoolers and randoms with an email address could join, the exclusivity of facebook meant that only my classmates, colleagues and actual friends could friend me. I was swept up in being connected to girls I'd lost touch with since graduating high school--I was living post-Katrina and needed that connection to home-- nd loved that I could make groups for classes, student organizations and my inner circle. It was like someone put together the best parts of AIM and myspace and left out the creepiness. Until it got creepy when some guy who was friends with all of my friends but had never seen me in real life decided to start chatting me up. (I knew that posting an actual picture of myself was a bad idea, which is why to this day I have my privacy on lock and rarely use pictures of myself as my profile picture.) It would have been all good if it stopped there but then this person told friends of friends that he waas in love with me--b*sh I don't know you--and all kinds of other weird stuff. But sadly, that was only the beginning of the creepy.

Eisenberg is a better Zuckerberg than Zuckerberg lol

Facebook grew,  and eventually let everyone and my mom join facebook as long as they had an active email account. My inbox flooded with friend requests from people I didn't know or want to know and my timeline began to fill up with images and topics that made me cringe. I don't care about your religious/political views, I wish you were acquainted with grammer, I don't want to see your baby baking or the meal you cooked, I am not donating to your cause, I don't live in your state to go to your event and in general I don't care...if I did I would call/text/email/write/smoke signal you. The red flags of the dangers of over sharing began to pop up and I stopped accepting friend requests from most people. Relationship turning sour, I began to plan my exit...which is exactly where this finds me. 

On one hand, I'm a blogger who is all over the internets and I love to shameless promote myself which is why I log on to facebook in the first place. On the other hand-- that would be my left hand--I do not like the superficial level of connectedness that it perpetuates. Just because we are fiends on facebook does not mean you know thing the first about my life--unless I'm an over sharer and in that case you know waaaaay too much. Seriously, my relationship status, posted pictures, links and quotes and my likes and dislikes aren't me. If you wanted to know me, and more importantly I wanted to know you, we would actually talk...like on the phone. The connection that you have with me online is not only superficial but contrived by me to sell whatever I'm selling just like you're selling whatever you're selling. Sadly, 80% of my "friends" on facebook are selling things that I would never buy. All of this leaves me feeling both torn and confused, facebook helps contribute to my profile online and my side hustle but it grosses me out...much like a boyfriend that you've outgrown that you love because he's comfy and familiar but since he let himself go and started acting like a major douche you can't bring yourself to kiss him let alone practice making babies with him. 

While I haven't had the "it's not you, it's me" talk with FB just yet, I know its coming. Especially since all those food and fetus pics make me want to gag, and the thought of people that I would avoid at all costs in real life knowing my life bothers the heck out me--that's the reason I rarely post anything personal that and the fact that both of my parents and several aunts, uncles and cousins are my "friends" now and most of them would flip their shit if they knew how I felt about God, politics, music, art, movies, men and pretty much everything else.



 
John Legend - I Used To Love You by mgl_la

Shake It Out

You know I love me some Flo + The Machine but this isn't about her song, it's about me saying a few things that I'm sure 99% of America--well 99% of the people in America that know me--would never know about me in a million years. Getting this stuff out isn't about you feeling sorry for me or anything, I'm too old for your pity give it to Eden Wood, it's about putting what's real and true out there. So here goes....

5 Things You Wouldn't Guess About Me From Looking.

5. I'm a socially awkward snob.

4.  Guys do not ask me out, aside from creepers who ask everyone out. Seriously, my ex was the only non-creepy guy who asked me out in 5 years of living in Atlanta and that scares the hell out of me 95% of the time.

3. I work in fashion so I have a million and one better things I would love to discuss that have nothing to do with fashion...like quantum physics.

2. My spirit animal is a combination of Zooey Deschanel, Witch Baby and a mama wolf.

1. I like my men smarter than I am and just as socially awkward. Maybe I should start hanging out at Tech...

There's a few things I'm leaving out but I'm not ready to go there...yet.

You Look Like You Read Books...

My younger brother is 6 years younger than I am, that means that for 6 years I perfected the art of hanging with solo. I spent hours in my room letting my imagination run wild after throughly nurturing it with every word that I could pronounce on my own in every book that I owned--which was a heck of a lot considering that most children under 10 aren't usually prolific readers. By the time my brother arrived I was starved for a playmate--not that I didn't have friends I was just a little kid and little kids don't ever have tons of friends--but I only wanted a playmate who, like my imaginary friends, also loved to read, paint and play games based on the stories I read. Yeah, I love my brother but we do not share the same passion for the written word.

By the time I entered middle school the characters in my books had become my best and most trusted friends, as evidenced by my bookshelf beginning to sag under the weight of 11+ years of books. I'd added two encyclopedias--that's Wikipedia's grandma for you whipper snappers,The Boxcar Children, Witch Baby--I think I read that so many times the cover fell off--R.L. Stein's Goosebumps, and the ultimate "I was an adolescent girl in the 90's" identifier,  The Babysitter's Club--Claudia and Stacey aka Anastasia McGill were my faves. It was also right around that same time that I my love affair with glossies lik Seventeen, Sassy, YM (Young & Modern), COSMOgirl and Jump began, but that's another blog post. 

 

Things got rocky as I began to transition from childhood to whatever the hell you call being a teenager. My grandma died, my childhood home flooded and my parents got divorced but my books were still there ready to help me escape the hell of being a 12 year old black girl who could quote Clueless verbatim, openly loved Alains Morrisette and Nirvana, had her first celeb crushes on Elijah Wood and Leonardo DiCaprio and wanted to be a VJ/actress/model/writer/slash in New Orleans. (For those of you who don't get how hellish this could be all I have to say is it was not pretty being in a group of people who looked like me but didn't accept me because I wasn't a stereotype. Those girls are now knocked up and/or married, doing God knows what and couldn't dream of squeezing into their prom dresses while I'm still a size 4 with no baby daddy drama and I'm some kind of writer.) What was I saying again? Oh right, my books pretty much got me from 6th grade to high school, where I began to pretty much stick to assigned reading materials and Cosmopolitan. 

After high school life went from cheerleading, homework and boys to partying, homework, boys and more boys--I'm the first to admit that I was a bit boy crazed up until about 21 or so. My books didn't really fit in with my schedule but that doesn't mean I didn't read, it just means I'm not really 100 on what I was reading. I still spent hours in Barnes and Nobles between classes and loved walking into the library just for the smell of it, I just didn't have time to forge many new friendships with Tolkien's characters until I graduated and moved to Atlanta where I didn't know anyone. My first summer here I read the entire Harry Potter series in reverse order and then moved on to Twilight (let down)....Then I fell in love with my very own Edward Cullen who left me in the woods like Bella after almost 3  beautiful years.

Now, post breakup, the books are back again but these aren't the books of my childhood. My new bookshelf houses hardcopies of Harry Potter 1-7, the Twilight Saga, a bunch of chick lit and reference guides and my newest addiction self help/spirituality tomes. Girls, getting broken up with does some strange things to you. I've seen girls become whores, crack addicts, crack addicted whores, lesbians, crack addicted lesbian whores, workaholics and only God knows what else after having their heart really broken, it either brings out the best or the worst in you. I didn't go the crack addicted, workaholic slore route, instead I took a break from writing and became a full on student of now age spirituality, see DharmaAndTheCity.

The point is, my books have been the one security blanket that got me through life. They never bore the hell out of you, whine about anything and always provide the perfect escape when the going gets tough without the lows of alcohol and coming down off of a drug/sex/chocolate binge. So I'm beyond ecstatic that one of my former co-workers took one look at me (and my FBF) and said "You look like you read." I mean what is the alternative, looking like you're illiterate?