I thought about giving up Facebook for Lent – it’d be easier than giving up liquor or popcorn (homemade, and essentially just a vehicle for real butter and salt – although the movie theater stuff works too, dripping with artificial flavors and colors and trans fats. Purity is overrated).
Since this period of fasting and penitence would be for self-improvement rather than religion, a superficial sacrifice wouldn’t be so apt to piss off God.
He’s already disappointed in me, anyway. It’s like getting that first scratch on a new car – once you deal with the initial pain and regret, there’s a certain freedom in being marked.
But I’m not addicted to Facebook, so it wouldn’t really count as a meaningful denial (we won’t talk about liquor or popcorn). And it’s such a wonderful source of mirth! Not the memes or the jokes, mind you. I love watching the self-righteous expose themselves.
We’ll save discussion of the flasher in the family tree for another time.
Most recently, a Facebook acquaintance posted a detailed personal drama involving an Airbnb rental in Boston. She got it for a song for the week she’d be there, and was smug in self-satisfaction at her adroit skill in working the system.
Then she got her check-in instructions, which involved skulking around the apartment building to find the key in an unmarked lockbox on a chain-link fence behind the Dollar Store next door, and entering the building only through the parking garage.
Clearly, it was an illegal sub-let.
She was outraged – but not at the illegality. “I can live with that. I just don’t like that I’m supposed to be deceptive and sneak around while dressed for business and schlepping my suitcase.”
How dare they inconvenience me when I’m in the wrong?
Such sound and fury, signifying nothing but hilarity.
The truly good stuff doesn’t come out on FB. It’s like one of those three-page Xmas letters you get from some friends hitting the highlights, but all year long, updated in real time. I haven’t missed a thing for dropping FB and Twitter completely. A convenient blog with a lively and erudite commentariat satisfies my need for real-time snark on events of interest, both to listen and contribute. And I get in so many fewer fights with random strangers over whether the word “honky” can legitimately make them sad and oppressed. (The answer is that if you’re not a Hungarian immigrant in the nineteenth century, then take your lumps and count your blessings you don’t have to deal with the real shit).