You know how I mentioned something about a wedding I'm going to be in? Well, it's looking like 2011 is actually going to be the year of four weddings and a funeral. In the midst of everything, I decided to do something I'd been thinking of doing for a few months now... No, I didn't get another tattoo, go off birth control or dye my hair pink.
I deactivated my Facebook account. Many of my friends have done it, some temporary, some not. I told one such friend who'd left and come back and she said that it's something people do when they go through a breakup. For me, it was a different kind of ending which helped me put things into perspective. It's been about a week. Here are some things I miss:
- Using Facebook like a community message board, i.e. who can help with this, who has this, what do I do about this, etc. It was pretty efficient.
- Stalking people I don't know. I'll admit, I look up people all the time. People who write things, people who tweet things, friends of friends. Figuring out who knows who.
- Immediate access to all of my pictures. I downloaded a gigantic file which supposedly contains all of my pictures and messages and stuff, but it's still sitting on my desktop, waiting to be organized.
- Event invites. Not all of them, just the ones I actually sort of maybe wanted to go to.
- And the jokes. Sometimes my friends can be really funny.
- Oh, and the traffic, here to this blog. It wasn't totally huge, but people actually clicked on the links I posted... makes me feel loved.
Here's what I don't miss:
- Random chats from people I didn't want to talk to/had nothing to say and were just bored.
- Being constantly irritated. Someone complaining about mother's day, or having no one to go out with. I've always tried to be mindful of what I posted. Same with Twitter and this stupid thing- I want my posts to have some relevance, either help or humor or awesomeness... like, look at this awesome recipe I made! You should try it! I know that not everyone cares about the shoes I just bought or where I'm going or what I'm doing, but at least it's better than complaining. Actually, I guess I'm complaining right now, but I'm complaining about people complaining. At my old job, we used to talk about the negativity monster, and now a negative attitude can be contagious. It got so bad we even named him Negator.
- All of the time I wasted reading people's comments, looking at their vacation photos, etc. Now that I'm on Twitter, a lot of people post the same things on their FB and their Twitter, so I was even getting a double dose. Turns out, I can live without hearing what my bartender is doing about her flat tire and that a friend in high school just got a pedicure. I'm now way ahead in the online classes I'm taking, and there's a lot more internet time for Funny or Die, Huffington Post- I've even started reading a handful of new blogs and I think I'm going to be starting a new, companion blog to Misadventures soon.
- Relationship drama. Not that I had it, but it's like this.
- Worrying about people tagging drunk/unflattering photos of me.
I can't say that this is a brief hiatus or a forever departure, but so far I'm sort of enjoying it. If I was still on FB, last night I would've posted about how smart I felt for figuring out I could get kitty litter shipped to my house for FREE by Amazon.comm, and that sleeping on clean sheets feels awesome.
See? Unnecessary.
