Facebook. Yep. Facebook. I now count Facebook among my addictions. When I’m at work, I’m at work, and when I’m at school, I’m at school, but the moments in between I’m checking Facebook every 15 minutes. It makes me feel connected. Crazy, I know. Whatever.
Here, at least for the first year or so, I enjoyed a cerain level of anonymity which is so useful if you have a pathological ego. You can actually really let your existential hair down and, bizarrely, that makes the quality of the work go up because the quality of the work correlates closely with it’s honesty. And if I knew that anyone that knew me was reading this . . . Especially at the beginning, when I was hemorrhaging the insanity that my life had been . . .  I couldn’t have done it. I don’t do it. Members of my family read this and my actual name is attached to it.
I still feel safer here than I do on the rest of the internet, which is really delusional, but it’s not Facebook, where, to paraphrase the late, great Karen Carpenter, “I’m living out my life on pages with ten thousand people watching.”
So I woke up this morning and fired up the Mac, brewed a cup of coffee, and logged in to Facebook, and there on Facebook in front of God & Everybody & Co. (that’s a great name, I have to remember that, oh look a blue car!) is a request from OGL to confirm our relationship. “It’s complicated, ” it says.
Ignore it. It’ll go away.
No. I can’t ignore it. That will hurt his feelings.
One of the ways that people have earned their way out of my friendship on Facebook is to change their relationship status too much. Single! In a relationship with FacebookWhore#2! It’s complicated! =( Single. It’s complicated.
It’s not fucking complicated, ok? It’s not.
It’s more complicated to navigate caring about someone and to allow them the freedom to express themselves without getting hung up on the minutiae of linguistics and privacy and all the other bullshit that accompanies living out our lives on pages.
“Acceptance is the key to all my problems today.” I’ve written more than one tirade about that particular sentence, so you can imagine how I feel about saying that in this case it’s right.
My friend Charlotte’s Facebook status changed to say that she wondered what would happen if she “just let go,” and just an hour before I was wondering the same thing. What would happen if I just let go? What would happen if I just accepted things as they were and people as they truly are. What would happen if I just accepted the fact that OGL is over the moon over me? What would happen if I just accepted the “relationship request” on Facebook?
What would happen if I took it a step further and refused to call it “complicated”? What if I accepted it without that condition?
It’s not fucking complicated, ok? It’s not. Most good ideas are simple. THIS can be simple. LIFE can be simple. Acceptance is the key to this “problem” and the only “problem” here is me. This solution worked for everything else so why not apply it here? Right?
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Thanks for the shout out but what I don’t understand is…what is the big rush to quantify everything? It’s wonderful for OGL to be over the moon for you but we all know that feelings change many times within a day.. Get to know each other, date, talk, listen with your whole heart, touch lightly and carefully, share confidences, build trust, take it easy but take it (as Woody Guthrie would say). Oh btw, the solution will work for this situation. I really believe this and I believe in you.
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you know chris- i’m not an expert here. i spend way too much time blogging and checking stats and yada yada myself. i’m not that enamored with facebook, but i like it.
but larger than that is the concept of (1) harm reduction and (2) progress not perfection.
i love some of your posts on your blog and similarly i love the wit and panache you bring to my fb page. if you are avoiding doing other tasks in life because you are lost in the applications of fb, my 1st question would be so what? (1) this is much better than some of the fascinations of your past. it may not be the optimum, but then that’s why (2) applies. you don’t have to be perfect today.
what’s that lyric “you’ve got to live a little…. laugh a little… ….and even have the blues a little.. that’s the story of … that’s the glory of…
life
i say- give yourself a break… at least as much as you would give me…
you are not required to know everything or be flawless. at least i certainly hope not… -
I wouldn’t assume because you post on your status update that you’ve put up a new entry that you’re getting new readers. I have noticed that on Facebook, the entire dynamic is quick, quick, quick, let’s absorb as much information across a wide range as possible but nothing longer than a line or two. I seem to have the same readers as ever, very rarely even getting a new commenter. I’ve long preferred having my blogamis separate from people I know in “real” life, anyway. People I meet are always apologizing for not reading my blog, and I actually find it a relief.
Sorry, I disagree. There is ALOT in between “single” and what is commonly understood by “in a relationship” People have agreements. They may live together but not sleep together, sleep together but not live together, be separarated but likely to get back together, have an open relationship, be completely unsure where they stand with someone. What I find funny is the impulse many FBkers have to rush to change their status when things are unclear. I always take a new “it’s complicated” as a signal that “if you’ve always had a crush on me, now’s your chance” or perhaps a need to tell your b.f the fight you’ve had really shook you up. But if, say, I had a boyfriend who moved to Europe, and we were still attached but agreed we could date while apart, I think that would be grounds for “its complicated.” In fact, you and OGL sound a bit “complicated.” You’ve mentioned twice he’s “over the moon” for you, but howabout you for him? Is it possible you were totally unprepared for the possibility that there might be a slight imbalance in your favor? You can give yourself permission to feel the way you feel instead of the way you think you should feel, you know. -
~It’s more complicated to navigate caring about someone and to allow them the freedom to express themselves without getting hung up on the minutiae of linguistics and privacy and all the other bullshit that accompanies living out our lives on pages.~
dear one, why not tell OGL what you are feeling about this? about wanting to keep things simple and not complicated – yeah, linguistics. we have a thing about words, don’t we?
complicated, as per my favorite online resource dictionary.com, says this: 1. to make complex, intricate, involved, or difficult.
difficult. we are in a program of simplicity. simple. not complicated, keeping things simple…easy does it. we can get very twisted over phraseology, but in the end, we are the ones who complicate things.
your friend isn’t in a 12-step program and doesn’t understand the weight behind the word. i think speaking to him about it would do you a world of good.
love you.
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