Thankful Day 4

November 4: Social Networking
To be clear, I absolutely think social networking is ruining my life. It sometimes makes me feel…like…really bad about myself. Like the time when Meg and I waited a whole year to tweet “May the 4th be with you” on May 4th…come to find we are not AT ALL original or as hilarious as we had previously thought. And we have heard that the online world is ruining our lives for years now…but damn it if it’s not true! Louis CK was right! “Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy! Technology is phenomenal right now and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots…” We collect shallow Facebook/Twitter friends like they are pokemon cards and half of them we have never and will never meet in real life. Welcome to the #21scentury!! (RT, please.)

On another hand, social networking sites are carefully constructed to make everyone’s lives look better than they actually are. This is either good or bad depending on if we are talking about my own Facebook or anyone else’s Facebook, especially people you went to high school with and/or your ex-boyfriend.

For my own account, I could have people thinking I am living some kind of action packed *romcom of a movie if I wanted them to. I mean, how many times are you at a party with that girl that’s taking a picture of everyone there making a “Go WILD” face and holding up some **gang symbols and sticking their tongue or pretending to laugh for the SOLE purpose of posting it on Facebook!? How many times do you read a run-on sentence as awful as the one I just wrote?

Anyway the picture –HELLO you aren’t going to frame that shiZ! That girl wants people to think she is having the time of her freaking life regardless of whether or not she would rather be at home in her “moose have a hug” nightie watching movies. And OKAY I will admit, sometimes I am that girl. …And OKAY sometimes Bethany calls me out on it and reassures me that we can do really fun spontaneous things without video-taping them for others to see and comment on how awesome we are. Like the other night when we went “extreme walking” which is a game that very closely resembles par course. But better! Bethany has the best ideas ever and thanks to her, (and more importantly the fact that my iPhone cannot video tape in the dark), we have no evidence of the amazingness of that night posted on the YouTube.

KEY:
*romcom = Romantic Comedy…keep up
**Gang symbols: patented and made famous by Alicia Perry Beaver’s sweet sweet mother while wearing an oversized black hoodie. #EPIC

For my ex-boyfriend…for starters we aren’t Facebook friends because he “ignored” my friend request years ago so I am stranded in Facebook purgatory forever. But you get the point. For everyone else, we live in chronic fear of missing out on the best night ever, or everybody seeing us change that relationship status from “in a relationship” to “single”. THE HORROR! (Which is also why I will never allow my relationship status to be posted on the Facebook until I am married. For all of you, you will think I am single until BAM the wedding pictures show up on your mini feed, and you realize you weren’t invited to the wedding. Just kidding, you will be invited to the wedding.)

Speaking of weddings, the WORST of all is when you find out ANOTHER one of your friends is getting married…because that essentially means they are winning in life. Theoretically, I do fine sitting in my basement by myself eating Doritos until I read that status update or the wedding invitation. That’s when I throw my hands in the air in surrender and start considering what I did wrong. I all too soon assume that these engaged happy people have it together and have a spice rack in their home and everything. The spice rack is just a metaphor serving as a parable of my life and where I am going and where I am not. The lesson is vague, but there. Spice rack = stability and fairy tale endings. Please remember - this is all just theoretical. I don’t even like Doritos. Anyways we are all pretty much insecure wack-jobs and Facebook just feeds the fear, baby.

With that being addressed, like an idiot - I love it. I love Facebook and its far superior partner, Twitter. It makes me think I am buddy-buddy with celebrities and makes me sound funnier than I actually am. It gets me through a lot of work days, provides countless fits of laughter and entertains a world that is in clear constant need of entertainment. We are pathetic low life’s you know that right? But as it stands, social networking allows me to keep in touch with my friends that I don’t actually keep in touch with for real and for that, I am thankful. I am thankful that twitter introduces me to hilarious YouTube videos and gives me a place to rave about how much I love the fightin’ Texas Aggies even when they SUCK so very bad at football. And it gives me a platform to relentlessly self-promote my blog without sounding TOO stuck up…kind of.

So in spite of all that is wrong with it (and that is basically everything), and in the spirit of instant gratification and not caring about the eternal impacts of our decisions (READ: The American Lifestyle) I am in fact thankful for #socialnetworking. By stars, this is America dangit! God help us. (but seriously….God help us.)

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am praying for the condition of my heart. God knows we are going to have to stand before Christ one day giving a full account of what we did with our spare time. And Facebook and Twitter are NOT going to give us leverage towards holiness. In fact, the opposite is probably true. Am I right or am I right??