Tag Archives: facebook status updates

Dear Awesome Facebook Status Updates

24 Jan

Dear Awesome Facebook Status Updates,

I’ve done some serious facebook bashing/mocking/whathaveyou in the past but I don’t think I’ve given full credit to the awesomeness that good facebook status updates deserve.  Someone should make a flip calendar out of these gems.  Case in point:

WHICH ONE OF YOU KEEPS RECALLING ALL OF MY LIBRARY BOOKS ON EXPERIMENTAL / AVANT-GARDE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN WOMEN’S POETRY? I know I know you.

Followed by a friend’s helpful suggestion to leave a note inside for a potential future soulmate.

BRILLIANT. Would that not be the best ‘how we met’ story ever?  And for once Facebook would be partially responsible for bringing people together NOT in a creepy stalker way.

Also, it’s time I admit that I get most of my weather, sports, and world news from Facebook.  Although I have to admit, the world seems eerily focused on Seattle weather, Husky sports, and non-profit and literary news, in a way that doesn’t quite match my weather here in San Diego, these “Chargers” and “Steelers” and “Saints” other people talk about, and this lack of funding / complete apathy towards non-profits and literature I hear exists in this country—

but I only leave my house to go to used bookstores or to go to Whole Foods , so my bubble isn’t really burst when I get off my computer…isolation and selective exposure work both ways, people!  Don’t let the Tea Partiers have it all to themselves!  Make it your own! Run for office on a platform that people actually care about education and words and art and starvation and health care!  People will call you delusional.  They’ll say you don’t know the statistics, that you’re imbalanced.  Don’t listen!  Put poems on your websites and refuse to take them down!  Insist they make sense!

I assume everyone else’s FB is filled with status updates about the Huskies and avant-garde feminist poetry, too?  Non?

Also, without Facebook Status Updates and link sharing, how else would I find beautiful websites, such as Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling ?  And such beautiful articles as You Should Date An Illiterate Girl ?

My point is, my friend with the recalled poetry books may meet her soulmate through FB, or possibly through the note she’s going to leave in the book— which is old-fashioned and charming and something our grandmothers might have done and FB is completely unnecessary to the process and such opportunities are why Kindles are trying to destroy the world by killing our chances at reproduction– or maybe not.

But either way, Facebook: the new, updated, expanded vision of the old lady peering out her kitchen windows into the house next door, down the street, over the hill, across the city, judging and shaking her head and smiling when those two crazy kids finally video chat in person after months of “liking” each other’s status updates.  OH LOVE.  YOU SO CRAZY.

Bless.

MM

Dear People Who Post Cryptic Melodramatic Status Updates on Facebook

19 Oct
Dear People Who Post Cryptic Melodramatic Status Updates on Facebook,

Such as:  “I hate some people!  Why can’t they figure their s*** out?!?”

“Friends suck!  If you can’t follow through, go to hell!”

“i hate it when friends don’t look at you when they answer your question clearly demonstrating they are mad despite claims to the contrary!!!”

“i just feel so alone.  why did he leave?” (WHY DID HE LEAVE? FOR GOD’S SAKE, TELL US.)

“i really effed up.”

“going into labor.  i’m so mad at him.”  (HAHA. Actually, feel free to post that anytime you like.)

A) IF YOU’RE GOING TO POST MELODRAMATIC CRAP, TELL US WHAT’S ACTUALLY GOING ON

so we can all be the creepy voyeurs we are and know what’s up.  instead of: “i am so sad some people cannot be trusted” I would much rather see: “My boyfriend cheated on me with my co-worker last night in the office and I walked in on it” a la Cosmopolitan confessions.  Then tell us all the details in the comments.

If you’re going to dish the gossip, bring it to the table piping hot and whip off the serving dish top so we can eat with it a soup spoon.  Don’t throw a few crumbs in the general direction of the dining room.  Savvy?

B) OR KEEP YOUR PERSONAL LIFE OFF THE FACEBOOK.

Hey guys, remember when it was called THE Facebook?!? As in, www.thefacebook.com???  Yeah, that happened.

Back to business: when you’re sad / lonely / disillusioned / just been cheated on / fighting with a friend: call someone.  Preferably your mother or someone else obligated to listen to your sob stories at inconvenient times.  If you’re friends with me, you can call me (graduate student: always willing to procrastinate and very few real obligations on my time).

If you’re not friends with me, stay away from me.

BUT THE INTERWEBS ARE NOT YOUR PILLOW: aka, you cannot sob into them and not be judged.  People judge you for the crap you post.  I judge you. If you post things like, “Glad I know who my real friends are” immediately after a life change— like moving out of house with roommates or getting married or going through a traumatic alien encounter— your friends will suspect you are talking about them.  You will never be able to convince them otherwise, because they will never ask, because you put it on Facebook.

Because despite the fact that we all stare at Facebook for something like 80% of our workday (broken up into 20-second increments)….we still don’t publicly acknowledge it for the most part in face-to-face interactions.  When someone says, “Hey, I got engaged!” standard response is not: “Duh saw it on your FB like 2 min ago.”  FOR GOOD REASONS LET’S KEEP IT THAT WAY.

Thx. Srsly. 4Reals.

MM

Dear People Who Post Their Workout Stats on Facebook

17 Oct

Dear People Who Post Their Workout Stats on Facebook,

What the hell.  Why would you possibly think anyone cares.

Unless they were plotting your physical fitness in order to gauge how they would do against you in a fight, Jason Bourne-style.  In which case, still a bad idea to make such information public.  Have you people learned nothing?  Keep your mileage times to yourself.

If you’re slow, you don’t want the wolves to know.  If you’re fast, all the better– they’ll underestimate you.  Since we live in an urban forest and all.

Ay.

MM

Dear Joseph Gordon-Levitt

28 Sep

Dear Joseph Gordon Levitt,

Ok, I have a crush on you from when you were in Brick.  Even though I still can’t understand half the dialogue and was still asking questions throughout the entire movie by the third time I saw it, the nerdy-nerd-bird from Third Rock From the Sun and sweet-yet-dweeby boy from 10 Things I Hate About You had clearly grown up.

Or just gotten a haircut.  I don’t know, you’re slightly confusing, I don’t think your face has changed from 14 to 29.  But the haircut is clearly working for you!

And somewhere in there I read an interview that convinced me that you’re smart and choose smart scripts and that made me like you….smarty-smartpants.

Right! And I was willing to overlook (500) Days of Summer: Not a Love Story But Obviously Still a Love Story with Just a Slight Twist But Hardly Groundbreaking Like The Filmmakers Claim.  Don’t even get me started on that movie.  Yada yada yada it was so different it was new so refreshing…hellooooooo people it was a rom-com with a slightly shifted timeline.  And JGL, how clingy can you be?  She even warned you. She never lied, never said she changed her mind.

(Also: Ikea? Please. The grocery store is sexier. I’ve never seen anybody looking that happy in Ikea.  You know why?  Ikea is like hell but with worse lighting.) And then yes, ok, she turned around and was a total hypocrite because heaven forbid we have a girl who actually doesn’t end up in love with somebody at the end of the movie.  Heaven forbid those stereotypes go unenforced once! Yeesh.

It’s possible I’m biased against the movie.  It was summer.  I was dating the nicest guy ever— someone who would have willingly gone to Ikea with me, for example, to hold my hand against the onslaught of desk choices (ask any writer about the mania involved in choosing a desk. They’ll know).  And I was about to leave for graduate school.  Without him.  And I didn’t feel all that conflicted about it.  I’d warned him! He’d watched me apply! Anyway, I’m pretty sure we watched the movie together and then I cried and told him I felt mean and heartless (because I sometimes was). He forgave me.  I had the decency to feel worse.  But then I felt better.  Then I left.  And we broke up.

Like I said: I may have been over-identifying with the movie.  Or maybe I wasn’t.  Maybe it was just the right amount of projecting my life into fictional big screen drama, because there clearly is such a thing as the right amount of that.

Anyway!  Every other girl in this world apparently caught up with me when Inception was released. Facebook Status Updates July 2010:

“Can Joseph Gordon-Levitt come marry me already?”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me Joseph Goreden Levitttt is sooo hotttt?”

“JGL is super cute! He’s ‘dreamy’! Ha. Ha. I know what a pun is!”

I just saw Inception.  And JGL, your haircut is as compelling as ever.  But your character is about the blandest thing in that movie.  You barely say anything, you’re stiff as a board, you register almost no emotion, including when you find out your BFF is maybe going to kill you all.  You apparently don’t know much about the field you’re working in, and you “have no imagination.”  Including the fact that you can’t dream about big guns.  Ummmm.

Which is fine!  That was your role!  But what was the attraction?  Had no one seen your face before?  Was everyone else as turned off by the clingy, lovesick puppy in 500 Days as I was so that even this was an improvement?  Do we really, really, really just want to see a man with a gun in his hands?

Or do we as a culture have a secret fetish for anti-gravity wrestling in hotel hallways?  If so, the future holds great promise…

Anyway, call me. I’ve got an idea for a rom-com that doesn’t end with falling in love.  It actually will be groundbreaking.  I’ll let you wear the leather jacket from Inception if you want and there will definitely be a song-and-dance number and some crazy-fast noir dialogue.  No need to change what works.

I’ll even put a number in the title to tempt you to the project.

Love,

MM

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