Wasting Time

I de-activated my Facebook page today.

I'd been thinking about it for a long while and it just seemed to be the right day for it.

A few weeks back I had a conversation with a friend.

We were talking about what we do in the evenings after work.

We pretty much agreed.

We do the same thing.

We come home from work, fix a quick and quite unremarkable dinner.

We flop down in a comfortable chair, flip on the TV and open our laptops.

We sit and eat and, with TV as background noise, we hit our Facebook pages and cruise around to see what's been going on.

And before we know it, it's late and we go to bed.

And go to work the next morning.

And come home the next night to do the same thing.

All over again.

I've pondered the whole scenario over and over with me as the one-woman show.

Honestly....I don't like the performance.

Considering myself to be a reasonably intelligent person with just enough introspection to keep myself from going off the deep end over any wild or ridiculous idea,

wasting the number of hours I spend snarking around looking at pictures of other peoples food and birthday pictures.....is troubling.

I hasten to say.....I like birthday pictures.

I like food.

I like Facebook.

I like Mark Zuckerberg.

I don't even have a problem with the data analysis and collection of information.

It's a free service.

No one forced me to take advantage of that service and open myself up to analysis.

It was my choice.

So no, I don't have a problem with any of that.

I'll also note, I keep in touch on Facebook with friends whom I would never or at least rarely, ever keep in touch with, were it not for that easy and accessible social venue.

I value those connections.

I value those relationships.

What bugs me is my apparent lack of self-discipline to extricate myself from the

nightly ritual that robs me of my time.

No fingers pointed away from the source of my disappointment: ME.

Earlier in the day, a friend shared a YouTube video with me.

It sort of spoke to the troubled theme that's been snaking it's way around the

coils of my brain. It made me think...more...about this whole time-wasting thing.

Here's the video:

 Yeah, I know the whole overlap thing doesn't quite equate out to the whole math-thing
if you're into the whole math-thing.
But of late, I'm more into the not-wasting my jellybeans thing.

My jar's more than half-empty.

Who knows, I might be on my last handful.

What do I want to do with the few I have left?

Not waste them.
That's all I know for sure.

So I de-activated my account.

And it wasn't two hours before I heard from someone who means a great deal to me, saying there was something wrong with my page, that they got a notice that said they didn't have permission to access the page and.....well, they were sure I wouldn't do that.

Had I noticed a problem with my page?

Damn.

That's exactly what I did NOT want to happen.

I don't want people to think I blocked them or decided I didn't want to keep in touch anymore.

Damn Damn Damn

Now I'm not sure what to do.

I just know for now, for me....

it was the right thing to do.

(PS....Dear God, you DO know if I get hit by a bus three days from now

this is gonna be real creepy, right?)