Tag: Social Media

7 People You’ll Meet On Facebook

internet1I love Facebook.  It’s like waking up in the morning and a couple of thousand people climb out of bed with you.  Then, before you know it, there’s this gigantic cocktail party going on.  However, as with all social gatherings, there are a few people you kinda want to avoid.  Here’s a quick and dirty guide to the folks you need to stay away from on Facebook.  (FYI — So far, I’ve managed to steer clear of this crowd.)

Games R Us — I’ve got nothing against playing video games, but these people are the crack addicts of the Internet.  They’re constantly posting their achievements, sending you points and invitations, and generally cluttering up your Newsfeed.  Why?  They want to get you hooked, too — so you’ll send them points and power-up crap and we can all be junkies together.

Puppies, Cats and Babies — Whatever you do, stay away from these people and their videos.  The cute will overwhelm you, you’ll end up giving all your money to the Save The Children Fund and your house will be overrun by 9 cats, 4 dogs, an African Grey parrot and a colony of hamsters.

I’ve Got My Caps Lock On — These folks are permanently pissed-off.  They post things like:

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Or they’ll rant on (in capital letters) about how the highschool kid at Starbucks™ misspelled their name, or the traffic was horrible, or work is torture. and on and on and on.  And don’t get them started on politics!  If you hang with these snarly buggers, you may never smile again.

Share Bear Comedians — These are the people who think Facebook is Pinterest.  They post funny memes 10, 12, 16 times a day and an assortment of videos where some unsuspecting somebody gets nailed in the jewels.  Sometimes this stuff is funny, but eventually you realize these folks have nothing to say and they’re saying it all day — every day.  Can you imagine how much time they spend online just finding this crap?

I Have An Infinite Soul — These are the people who believe they live on a higher plane of consciousness than everybody else and have a burning need to share their awareness.  They’re continually posting platitudes to demonstrate their deep thoughts.  Mostly these are meaningless, self-help homilies.

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This is easy — stay away from these pompous assholes.

I’m Going To Ruin Your Day — These are the people who post videos of blind dogs with no legs or kids with tubes in them or lonely old people on park benches or … Sweet Jesus! Just kill me now!  How the hell do you respond to this stuff?  “Gosh, I never realized the world was so full of torment and suffering.  I think I’ll just turn off my computer and cry for an hour or two.”

And finally:

I’m Old And You’re Stuck With Me — These are those sweet old friends and relatives who are still trying to figure out The Google.  Somebody set them up on Facebook, you friended them to be nice, and now they think every time you post something, they’re required to make some lame ass comment.  Plus, they’re somebody’s mom’s friend or an uncle Bill so you can’t unfriend them without feeling like a shit.  The best thing to do is just lol them once in a while and carry on.  (Most of them think lol means Lots of Love, anyway.)

GOOD LUCK!

I Have A Friend

friendI have a friend.  The curious thing is I have no idea who she is.  I’ve never seen her, or spoken to her, or heard her voice.  I think I know her name — Babette — but I’m not sure.  You see, we don’t live in the same country.  We don’t even speak the same language.  Although, she must speak English — I don’t have any Dutch (maybe it’s Dutch?  Google Translator thinks it’s Dutch?)  But in actual fact, I have no facts about my friend whatsoever, except I’m pretty sure she lives on Crete.  The truth is, I only know her because she found me typing away in the digital world and said she liked me.  By chance, I clicked back and discovered I liked her too.  She’s curious.  She sees things many people miss.  She has questions.  Sometimes she has answers.  Yes, sometimes she has an attitude also but she feels life — large and small — and recognizes it for what it is.  And she’s smart and interesting.

So, why, out of the thousands of computer connections I make every day, do I know she’s my friend?  That’s even more curious.

After several weeks of reading and electronically liking each other, she left — disappeared — and unlike all the other random Internet comings and goings, I wondered what happened.  I missed her.  I went looking.  I stood on the edge of the vast cyber wilderness and called her name.  The sound was hollow.  She wasn’t there.  And I felt the loss.

A couple of days ago, my friend showed up again and said she still liked me and explained to her virtual world where she’d been in the real one.  I was glad she was back.  I was excited to see her — happy that my friend had returned.

People seek each other out (we always have.)  It satisfies a need in our psyche and our soul.  These days, the threads that connect us might be as thin as the click of a wireless mouse on a midnight screen half a world away.  But that bond is real.

I don’t know anything about my friend — except I know what she feels.

So, Babette, eat your vegetables, drink some wine, get plenty of sleep, hug the people you love and keep them close.  And if sometime, in the cold, dark soul of 4 o’clock in the morning, you think you’re alone in this world — you’re not — because you are my friend.

When The Mind Wanders!

ideasSome mornings, before the caffeine kicks in, my mind tends to wander.  Here are a few thoughts.  I’ve dressed them up a bit for public consumption and there is a connection here — somewhere — I think.

The F-bomb is not a bomb anymore.  In fact, it’s not even a firecracker.  Once a powerful part of speech, it was used sparingly for shock and emphasis.  Unfortunately, these days it’s so common it’s become nothing more than punctuation.  Suburban moms use it at the spa; the suit and tie boys attempt to play badass with it and high school students wear it on their t-shirts.  However, if you still insist on using it as an adjective, for God’s sake don’t pronounce the “g” — you sound like a middle class moron.  We have different and more powerful naughty words now, and if you want a gasp from the crowd, drop one of those babies into a casual conversation (but be prepared for the Social Media storm — and unemployment.)

Social Media is beyond relentless.  Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and all the rest are like a Pantheon of Greek Gods: ever watching us, picking favourites, interfering, directing our lives, soothing and punishing at their whim.  And we, mere mortals — we — are Sisyphus endlessly toiling to satisfy their will.  It’s like waking up every morning and a couple of thousand people climb out of bed with you, put their shoulders to a boulder and before you know it, there’s this massive cocktail party going on as we all struggle up the hill.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is not a very good movie.  Everybody thinks it is because the first time we saw it we were young and awkward and full of hormones.  Bueller is that confident teen we all wanted to become.  Watch it as an adult and you realize Bueller is actually the asshole kid that always got away with murder.  He’s the one who conned the teacher into extra time on the project that you just pulled an all-nighter for.  The guy who got the girl he didn’t deserve — notably Mia Sara.  And he probably grew up to be a ratbag lawyer (no offence ratbags.)  Incidentally, Matthew Broderick was 24 when he played Bueller and his buddy Cameron, Alan Ruck, was 30.

It’s totally unbelievable how old men always get the hot chicks in the movies.  Check out Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment.  Connery is probably one of the sexiest men who ever walked the planet, but by the time Zeta-Jones came calling, he was nearly 70 and she was barely 29.  Sex is a powerful motivator but there isn’t enough Viagra in the world to make that hookup palatable.

Huffington Post is going to conquer the world.  They’re re-running Randolph Hearst’s winning combination of bad news, snake oil, self-help and boobs and it’s working beyond their wildest expectations.  Not since Hugh Hefner dressed nudity up in a sports jacket and cool-J jazz has a media outlet made such an effective use of soft-core smut.  Try typing NSFW into Huffington Search and you’ll get over 150,000 items in less than a second.  And that doesn’t include all the salacious photos of Paulina Gretzky, Jennifer Lopez, one or more Kardashians, or any other available female.  Then to balance it out, Huffington features a phalanx of bloggers decrying sexism as if nobody ever heard of it before.

One more cup of coffee while I check out Facebook real quick.