Shut Your Facebook
There it is. I’ve gone and done it. I’ve deactivated my Facebook account. Notice the word, “deactivated;” It’s a little like the Mafia, Facebook, a little like the Mormon Church. My pictures and posts will remain accessible to all of my friends online, as well, I imagine, as anyone else who cares to use or manipulate them for any reason at any point in the future. They are the property of Facebook (I foresee an advertisement for ass shrinking cream). Also, I have been assured with the supreme arrogance only potent in a social network boasting a membership in the trillions? that I can log back into my account any time I’d like using the same email address and password. Like the membership roles of the Mafia Church, (“Once I thought I was out, then they pulled me back in.”) I will stay effectually in the Facebook database forever. Even if I should sign up for the rumored Googleme, or convert to the Church of Islam, or Second Life, whatever.
So in effect what I’ve done is entirely symbolic, is only symbolic. My attempt to extricate myself from the social networking site lacks any finality. As a last farewell, I was subjected to a short parade of the 21 photographs in my Facebook photo album. All of my friends (those who have Facebook accounts) are named here individually, one per photograph, as though each were personally addressing me, in effect guilting me into staying, “__________will miss you!” With that I am out the Facebook door, symbolically speaking…the degree of this severance is only as strong as my will not to log back in. To celebrate I watch 14 clips of Curb Your Enthusiasm and one full episode involving a text relationship between Larry David and a nine-year old girl who has a rash on her pussy, a joke which I fail to “get” throughout, because at a crucial point I left the room, and which makes me titularly queasy, because the implications are horrifying, since I don’t “get it.” Here is the life I’ve been missing.
In order to deactivate, not delete (deletion is not allowed) my account, I had to provide a reason. Was I spending too much time on Facebook? Did I, perchance, not understand how to use the site? Was I getting too many notifications, too many friend requests, not enough? There were several statements to choose from, and though any and all of them at different times of the day have applied to me (like fortune cookies and horoscopes) sometimes one friend request is too many, sometimes it is not enough. Though each of the listed reasons holds some relation to my decision to sever my ties, there is not among them a box to be marked next to, “the man that I was sleeping with this time last year makes a habit of exclaiming the legitimate happiness he’s found with someone else via Facebook status updates and I am finding it more and more difficult to stomach,” if there were I would not have (keeping with my Facebook M.O.) checked it.
There was also no box to check next to: “The woman I was at that point nannying for at $10 an hour due to the terrific lack of J.O.B.’s, spends a good deal of time on Facebook (or so I’ve heard). Following a disagreement, which resulted in my unemployment, I Facebook de-friended her (the most terrible thing I could possibly have done I am told by Facebook afficianados, short perhaps of pushing her into the bread line). Still, even after said de-friending, I am subject to the pinging irritation of her overuse of excalmation points on the status updates of ‘Friends’ we hold in common. The quotations around ‘Friends,’ indicate that these people are my actual friends. I've met them for beers. I've listened to their dark secrets (in person no less) and had them over to my house for soup. Also, so one might get a sense of my jealous nature, as friends and ex-lovers go, and the moderately pixeled in-betweens. There is no box where I can indicate that Facebook has brought out of me some deeply seeded pettiness of which I am not proud and therefore will not be posting on…you got it…Facebook! And so I am leaving on a jet plane Facebook. I am leaving on a petty jet plane.”
In addition to not having a box for me to check next to “ecstatic ex-lover,” and “effusive, coddling commentary of ex-boss, and her vociferous leotard level of interest in everyone’s beeswax,” the decision to deactivate my account did not result in a box to check next to, “the daily façade of political activism I am subjected to via Facebook is so lethargically American that I can hardly resist the urge to splay my gorge across the first available set of loafers, er Skypes, as you would have it.” Neither was one of my choices: “I have come to think of Facebook as symptomatic to the breakdown of interpersonal relationships, in particular the need-of and response-to cries for constant-placation indicated in posts like, ‘I’m tired,’ or, ‘at the DMV,’ and their exact opposite, ‘Just got done working out!’ These foster in me a kind of rage that I can only source as death to the tension necessary in all art.” Finally, I am not allowed to choose: “Let’s see who can be the quietest Facebook? Whatdyasay we leave some room for inquiry? Shut your GD pie hole Facebook.” Or better yet, “just shut your Facebook!” I was however given the option for “Other,” under which I typed (in line with my Facebook M.O.) “None of your beeswax,” and under which I wish I would’ve typed: “...let’s face it. It was you, Charlie.”
