About Facebook

I have been a regular user of the social networking website Facebook, and I felt I should write something about it.

Facebook is great to keep in contact with people with whom you lost contact a long time ago, such as school friends, or with friends in general. How many times friends have changed their mobile phone numbers and e-mail addresses and that’s the last you’ve heard of them? So, it serves the purpose of a very useful agenda. It’s great for knowing what your friends and family are up to or sharing stuff with them, such as photos, music and videos. It is also great for learning and sharing knowledge. If I have the time, I like reading other people’s posts as well, which sometimes give me a better insight of things I knew very little about or even provide me with information I didn’t know anything about, and it’s a great tool for organising events and parties or creating groups supporting good causes... Oh, and I forgot, to make you look popular!

Now, Facebook has an ugly side as well. The amount of rubbish that sometimes goes on in there is unbelievable. Just for the purpose of structuring my thoughts here, I’ve decided to deal with each section separately:

Quizzes: Ok, everybody but their grannies can write a quiz! Some of them are very well done, but some of them... honestly... starting with a thousand spelling mistakes and ending up with how obvious the answer is going to be... So yes, if you want to be a Vampire, you’re likely to say yes to liking to attack people with your fangs and hating crosses and garlic!

Applications: Don’t get me started!! I believe some people have ignored the fact that some of their friends in Facebook are actually real, and have decided to ignore their very presence by getting immersed in the imaginary worlds of Farmville, Happy Aquarium, Mafia Wars or Café World, to name just a few... Most of them, actually, only use Facebook for that! Get an Xbox and play games instead, for goodness sake! Get real!

Status updates: Now here comes an interesting bit. It’s funny how when you post an update with some kind of insight or something that you may think will be of interest to other people, you hardly ever get any comments; however..., if you post the most stupid thing on earth like “I’m a lollypop”, sometimes you can have more than twenty comments about it! Weird! Then you have the little hidden questions you get sent via a message the answer of which is going to puzzle everyone because nobody knows where it comes from. So you might end up saying something along the lines of: “I’m a purple banana and I fly with fish because a fairy chucked a bucket of water over my head.”

And the fun goes on with multiple useless stats, name games, gifts and smiles... But, in spite of all that crap that goes on in Facebook, I have to admit, I love it :).

Thoughts about new beginnings

Another year done and dusted… New feelings of starting afresh… like every year. It’s funny how we measure our achievements by looking at them as happening in big finite chunks of time. A year… twelve months… 365 days of things happening to you good or bad, and the new year approaches as a huge blank book, a big white canvass, it’s all very exciting, all these new possibilities: I’ll go to the gym, I’ll change my hairstyle, I’ll find a better job, I’ll find the man of my life, I’ll travel to new places, I’ll meet new people, I’ll stop smoking and drinking… All looking great… Yes! Let’s chuck in the bin this awful last year! Let’s forget all about it and look into the new one! Time slows down, comes to a stop momentarily, and here we go again!

It’s as if everything should have a proper beginning. To open a new chapter we need to have closed the previous one properly, a kind of ceremony which often involves having lots of what we’re planning not to have anymore, like food, cigarettes or alcoholic drinks. If you go on a diet or start going to the gym, more often than not you will choose a Monday or the first day of the month for that, a proper start. If you choose any other day, it won’t feel like it’s happening, somehow…

We like celebrating beginnings and ends. Beginning or end of a year, start of the weekend, end of academic year, start of summer holidays… Yes, chunks of time… and if we don’t have these chunks of time as points of reference we are lost and it just makes no sense… Although on the first day of the year our brain is usually too muddled to handle all these new fantastic projects, so we make an exception and start everything on the second. It makes sense… Happy hangover!

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, it’s fine, I wrote it with a hangover…