Book My Face

Just like millions of others these days, I too am 'on Facebook'. As an intelligent 30-something woman in the 21st century, I too felt the need to network. As one of the leading online communities on the web nowadays, Facebook was, as far as I was concerned, the place to do that. Just moments after signing up, I discovered that networking on Facebook not only meant countless hours of addictive time-wasting and pointless messaging, but more importantly, it meant searching for and finding all the boys I had a crush on back in high school.

I thought Facebook was the ideal place to promote my otherwise nonexistent singing career, which is on the back-burner right now. Or, better said, it's behind the back burner under a layer of grease on somebody else's stove two blocks away from here. But it ended up being a portal to a community I never knew I had! Under the guise of networking for the benefit of my aforesaid fictitious career in music, I spent many hours and megabytes of data transfer on Facebook, doing just that: networking. And as any fellow Facebook-ian will know, networking essentially meant wasting as much time as possible doing the following:
- finding and making as many friends as possible.
- uploading as many silly yet vaguely attractive photos of yourself, your kids and your car as possible.
- adding as many high-maintenance applications (allowing full access to your personal information and that of your friends) as possible.
- updating what you're doing right now in the third person as often as possible.
- sending as many invites to others as possible in order to get the results of filling in as many pointless quizzes as possible.
- posting as many inconsequential messages on other peoples' walls as possible.
- spending as much time as possible doing as many utterly useless things as possible. (I mean, where else can you publicly compare your IQ to that of George Bush's?)

I did all of these things. The result was a profile page as long as the Gettysburg Address with a multitude of applications I had to maintain; applications that punished you if you didn't log onto them on a regular basis, giving me a stress factor equivalent to what Hillary Clinton must have felt when she realized she was no match for Obama for the presidential candidature.

Let me illustrate my point:
During the peak of my Facebook dependency, I was pregnant and voluntarily rooted to the spot in front of my computer. I was due in a few weeks and very much a permanent resident in the I'm-Having-a-Baby-Soon zone. Next to the dozens of other Facebook applications I had accumulated, I added a new one which involved 'adopting' a baby and 'taking care' of it. I thought this would be a wonderful way for me to brush up on my baby-nurturing skills and immediately adopted a baby boy named Bertje. Bertje was easy to care for. When I logged onto the application, I would find Bertje either crying or stinking. I had a couple options to appease Bertje, one was: feed Bertje, and another was: change Bertje's diaper. Nine times out of ten I did the right thing! Bertje was giggling again! Success! Thanks to little Bertje, I gained the confidence to know I would make the right decisions with my own baby as soon as it came into the world!

Now, as most everyone knows or has experienced personally, pregnant women tend to be very emotional and not really in the mood to demonstrate rational behavior, especially during the final stages of that magical state of 'being in the family way'. I was no exception. I would log on to Facebook and visit Bertje a few times a day, making sure I left him giggly and content, and often gazed at his little face, which I knew deep down was nothing more than a stock-free image of a laughing baby, but nonetheless, it was my Bertje.

A couple weeks later, I gave birth to my son, Bram. As I lay in my hospital bed, holding this brand new life in my arms for the very first time, fully aware of the deep responsibility and sleepless nights I was about to embark upon, I suddenly thought to myself: 'Oh my God, what am I going to do about Bertje?!' This was when I knew, Facebook was becoming more to me than just 'a fun place to reconnect'. It was time to go to Facebook rehab.

Fortunately for me, having a new baby created enough distraction for me to successfully kick the Facebook habit without too many unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. But by the time Bram was able to lie unassisted in his crib and entertain himself, I found myself right back on Facebook again, updating, posting, reconnecting, super-poking, networking. Oh, the time I'd lost! The applications I had yet to download! The wall posts I had missed!

But I found out, Facebook isn't just a virtual community narcotic. In an age when people have more photos on their mobile phones than they do in their photo albums at home, Facebook is the place to share those semi-flattering pictures of random people with serious cases of red-eye, drooling kids in the bathtub or out-of-focus snapshots of various foreign landscapes. When my kids have gone to bed and I need to wind down after a long day, I log onto Facebook so I can feel just a little bit closer to the people I vaguely knew in high school, thanks to that wonderful thingamabob called cyberspace.

So, maybe you and I can network on Facebook sometime soon! What? You don't have a profile yet? Then I suggest you get on the band wagon and join up, since it's pretty much the only way to communicate with anyone these days! If you haven't virtually flung a thong at somebody you haven't exchanged a single word with in over 15 years, well you're just missing out.