The Column
Motto: Aesthetic, Aesthetic, Rho, Owe, No, Gary, Me, Larry, Larry, Ewe, Site, Pneumatic, Me, Ewe
I have a plan for this post, so it might be more coherent than my last one. If not more coherent, at least more entertaining. Here’s the plan: Thoughts after leaving Facebook for a couple of months. A very confusing phonetic alphabet. A cool sense of pride. Then one line about Google. It’s been two months since I deleted my Facebook. I wrote about deleting it November 30th of last year and I deleted it later that night, if my memory serves me. I’m now going to answer the bolded questions that I had a friend make up for me (thank you to Danielle for this one):
How do you look up personal info (email, cell, etc) of those obscure people you sort of know and randomly need to contact?
I haven’t had to do that so much just yet. Generally, I know of a way to contact someone who knows of a way to contact them. If not that… I don’t know. Good questions.I don’t contact people whose contact information I don’t have very often.
How do you know people’s birthdays? (Lord knows you don’t remember them.)
I don’t. Even when I DID have Facebook, I never wished people happy birthday anyway. It always seemed like a very shallow and fake thing to do. “This thing told me it was your birthday and that I should probably tell you to have a happy one, so I’m doing that”.
What about all the years of pictures you had on there?
I went through my tagged pictures and saved 40 or 50 of my favorites to my local hard drive (later uploaded to Google Drive).
Don’t you think you’ll want to look back and laugh at yourself in a few years? Like looking at a social time capsule.
I think I have plenty of other sources to do that already. This blog. Email (I never delete emails, I have Gmail and 10 gigabytes of Gmail storage like everyone else). I think that people actually go back and look through their past too often, honestly. I think it’s healthy to do so occasionally, but Facebook made me do it waaay too often. I was always made very aware of the “theory” of my social status, rather than just living it out.
Don’t you get pissed when mobile games are like, “Sign in with Facebook!“?
Yes. But I was always pissed when it did that. Why does Facebook need to know what music I’m listening to, or what words I’m playing on whatever game on my phone, or what shows I’m watching on Hulu. It always creeped me out a little bit. The worst were those apps that decided FOR YOU what it wanted to share: “Aaron Gillespie read an article about some weird disease”. What? Does he have that disease? Why is he reading that? It never jived well with me.
Haven’t you wanted to creep on at least one person since deleting it?
I think this is my biggest problem with Facebook. It turned “creeping” on someone into something that was just normal to do. Melissa linked me to a post one time where a girl made an excellent point that I totally agree with. The TL;DR of it all was that her friend got a new boyfriend that she was unsure of. She added him on Facebook and, when he added her back, she went through all his posts and pictures and statuses to make sure she wasn’t creepy - only to realize that she was being the creepy one. Why did she need to see everything this guy had done in his past? Why didn’t she just meet him and see what kind of a person he was for herself? Everyone on Facebook is guilty of creeping on someone at some point in time and that’s just, well, creepy. Why are we okay with it?
What about the children?? Ignore that last one, just wanted to say it.
Facebook is absolutely no place for kids. If I had a catalog of everything I thought and said and did when I was a kid, right up through middle school, I would delete it off the hard drive. Burn the hard drive. Throw those burnt ashes into a vat of acid. Put that acid into a box and sink that box to the bottom of the ocean. People posting every little thing about their kid bugs me, too. “Little Billy has the rash again! :-(“. Little Billy’s future girlfriend is going to creep on Billy’s parents and think “why was he getting rashes? Would our kids get these rashes? Does he have the plague?!“.
How in the world will you poke people now?!
That’s not a real-life thing. It’s not a real life thing so it has no need to exist on the internet. Poking should die.
That ends my Q&A about leaving Facebook. The one question I’m surprised she didn’t ask was “Do you miss it?” I had an answer ready for that one. It was a simple and resounding “No.”
In other news:
I was thinking about the phonetic alphabet the other day and the scene from “The Hangover” where Alan says “’k’ as in ‘knife’”. I thought that was a pretty hilarious concept. I decided to expand upon it. Namely: Every letter in the alphabet.
Each of the things would be said “(the letter) as in (the word)”. So, I present to you, my version of the most confusing phonetic alphabet possible:
A – Aesthetic
B – Barry
C – Cite
D – Doe
E – Ewe
F – Foe
G – Gary
H – Hors D’oeuvres
I – Me
J – Jerry
K – Know
L – Larry
M – Moe ← I just realized I have two of the 3 stooges back to back here. Ha.
N – No
O – Owe
P – Pneumatic
Q – Qi
R – Rho
S – Site
T – Teri
U – W Divided by Two (but not in Spanish)
V – A Roman Five (or W divided by 2 in Spanish)
W – Wholly
X – Xena Warrior Princess
Y – You
Z – Zima
The new phonetic alphabet – easy as Aesthetic, Barry, Cite.
So, the other day I ran into someone I went to high school with out in the real world. This hadn’t ever happened to me before then. This particular person wasn’t really the kind of person I hung out with much in high school. Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to hang out with her. She was super nice and pretty… but she wasn’t in my class and I was generally too much of a wuss to talk to pretty girls. Anyway, we made eye contact before either of us recognized each other. When that recognition happened, it happened all at once to both of us. There was a “Heeey!” moment and I immediately got up hugged her like an old friend (it was only much later that I realized “wait, we never were never old friends… we never hugged in high school… we never even really talked in high school… why did I hug her? I guess I’m a hugger”). We had a very brief catch-up session. She is a nurse, working here in Kansas City for another few months. It made me happy to see someone else from my high school who went on to be successful. The thing that made me the most happy and caught me the most off-guard about all of this was just how proud I was when I talked about where I was and what I have done with my life thus far. I walked away from that 3 minute conversation way happier than would have expected myself to be if I were to theorize what running into someone like her would go like. So that was cool… and speaking of cool: Google put up a new Android statue on their campus. It’s made of chrome - and that’s awesome.
(Chrome is the name of their internet browser, mom) This made my inner nerd so happy.
Top 5: Movies I’m Looking Forward to Watching in 2013
- Monsters University
- Star Trek: Into Darkness
- Iron Man 3 (I love the Marvel movies)
- Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
- Thor: Dark World (I really love the Marvel movies)
Quote:
“That’s What.”She