Distracted by facebook

I admit it--I was distracted by Facebook. But I got burned out. Facebook can actually be very dull. Having seen countless Facebook videos of people's cats doing clever things, I have decided to swear off them. Unless you can train your cat to cook and serve a flawless dinner for 8 and then clean up the mess, I'm not interested. Or maybe she could knit a sweater or even a scarf. I will still watch videos of small children or dogs doing something cute. But it has to be really cute. I also like to see your grandchildren. i'm tired now. More tomorrow.

The curse of electronics

When e-mail started to be accepted by everyone, I was thrilled.  I could keep up with my friends without writing letters or even calling them on the phone.  When someone died, I just had to post regrets on the funeral home's website instead of struggling to write a letter which is really hard to write and takes you half a morning to compose and then you have to look for a stamp and an envelope and put it in the mailbox, not forgetting to write your return address in the upper left hand corner.

So I was happy to have e-mail.  Until I started to get hundreds of e-mail messages every day from every retailer I had ever bought anything from and many I had never bought anything from, not to mention begging letters from Nigeria.

When I got stuck in California for 8 weeks I came home to find 7,000 e-mail messages on my server.  It took me quite a while just to erase them and I've been grumpy about it ever since.

But e-mail is not nearly as intrusive as the ads on my iPhone that keep popping up with gross pictures of women with black stuff on their upper lip or big fat stomachs or ads for first, second, and third mortgages.  I'm getting to hate my phone as it takes me half an hour to read a paragraph or two.

Facebook was a nice alternative for a while, until cute cat videos started popping up.  I don't want anyone to send me pictures of their cats, dogs, or even horses.  I'm also tired of elephants.  If you are a Facebook friend of mine, please no Fauna of any description.  Flora yes, fauna no.

Truly important

Someone left a message on Facebook that she is really enjoying Downton Abbey.  Really and truly?   This is confirmation that the Internet rots the brain.  And yet I recently subscribed to tumblr, so that intimate friends can inform me over facebook, twitter (which scares me, it's too difficult), google + and my e-mail that they have a hangnail.  I can't read my favorite bloggers, because they have stopped posting to their blogs and use twitter mostly, which @#I don't understand, mainly because I don't feel like wasting my time trying to master it.

Blogger is starting to be frustrating to me too.  I used to think I had it mastered, but they have improved it to the point that I can't do anything with it, like post photos.  Ah, the dear old days!

I only know how to do three things on the computer:  1) backup and restore; 2)control, alt, delete 3) answer e-mail.  That exhausts my little bag of tricks.

Goodbye Facebook, Goodbye Twitter

I haven't posted anything on Facebook for months and am unlikely to.  My life, while it interests me, is both stressful and boring. s for Twitter, I can't even figure out where to start.  What are all those symbols and what do they mean?  Suppose I did it wrong?  I would feel like an un-with-it klutz, which I am, but why flaunt it?  I will still blog when I feel the urge, if I ever climb out of the ditch I'm in.

But the real reason I want to steer clear of these activities is that they are a terrible time-suck.  I can almost hear the remaining hours of my life circling the drain, while I ponder the mot juste.  So until someone figures out how to stretch 24 hours into 28 or 30, I think I'll abstain from social media.