Skip to main content

Sixty-three Days and Counting

 Earth date: August 31, 2020

“Join Facebook.” My friend said. “It’s a great way to stay in touch. A lot of the old gang is on there.” After years of spending every day with hundreds of other souls, I knew being retired would be a shock to the system. It would be only HoneyBunch and me in the house, no pets, with an occasional once a month visit from our kids and grandkids, so, I joined FaceBook for the fun of it and lasted a few months before I dropped out.

FaceBook was very antisocial, and it wasn’t exactly how I wanted to spend my retirement. 

Some of those who “friended” me weren’t very friendly. Now that I was no longer their supervisor at work and they didn’t have to pretend to like me, they let me know it. I had retired from one of those jobs where I had to mediate between two groups. They had taken sides instead of working together and I was the messenger, and we all know what happens to the messenger.  

I stayed off FaceBook for several months until the new career I sought required a social media presence. I definitely had to be on FaceBook, so I asked a few experienced friends how to do it without acquiring an ulcer and a cadre of haters. They suggested I select who I friended, block the ones I didn’t want to have access to my posts, and report the trolls – those who purposely try to start an argument.

For several years, I kept my friend list under sixty, and I learned to redefine the word “friend.” Facebook is like the school yard in middle school. Everyone wants to be popular and be friends with everyone, but that is misleading. It is rife with peer pressure, bullying, fights, cliques, gossip, and misinformation. Looking back, I don’t remember wanting to be friends with everyone in middle school. To survive you had to know how to defend yourself. If you didn’t, you were labeled a coward and a chicken, and got beaten anyway.

It’s the same thing with FaceBook. It’s not a friendly place. I outgrew middle school a long time ago. I know how to think for myself and I choose who I want in my gang.      

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Happy Breastday to Me!

I gave myself a very special birthday present this year – I had surgery. Before you think it was to increase, decrease, or “lift” something, let me tell you it was not cosmetic (though I could probably use a few nips and tucks at my age; the infinite number of creams I buy OTC are not working their promised magic). About four or five months ago, I discovered a hard lump about the size of a large marble in my left armpit.  I had been feeling small pangs of pain in my left chest for several months, but I figured it was just my turn to dance with heart disease.  Everyone in my immediate family is diabetic and suffers from strokes or heart attacks, so I thought – here we go; my turn. I was going to tell my internist about the pangs during my next visit, so imagine my surprise when I discovered the lump. The Drama Queen in me immediately manifested herself – cancer, I thought.  I have cancer. I searched some more and found that the texture on the left side of my left breast felt diffe
9 comments
Read more

Dating Challenged

I stink at dating – always have.   I sputter.   I hyperventilate.   I fail miserably every time. I blame a pathetically underdeveloped gene that got little use before I married in my early twenties, then atrophied, gathering dust and rust, until I became single again in my fifties.   I decided to use this defect to my advantage when I needed to do some investigative reporting a few years back.   While on a newspaper writing assignment on Boomer-aged dating, I sacrificed my dignity and my vanity for the sake of the story (and I got several). Thank goodness, HoneyBunch saved me from all this when we married.  (He comes up with the best dates.) I’ve decided I will “show you mine if you show me yours.”   I will swap dating horror stories with you, but you have to promise to play along. The trick here is to tell about your worst date in 25 words or less.   You must keep it clean and you cannot name names. Our little contest will run only this week and before my next blogger posting.   Me
8 comments
Read more

Grandma’s Dining Table

Twenty five years ago my first husband and I bought a new home with four bedrooms and three baths, but my favorite part of the house was the enormous room you walked into from the front door. It had no dividing wall but the design was to use half of it as a formal living and the other half as a formal dining. From the beginning I decided to make it into one huge dining room that would catch the eye when everyone walked in through the front door of my home.   My three children were very young, but I envisioned them grown and married. We counted five at the time, but one day we would grow to eight, maybe more if we factored in grandchildren, so I bought a table that sat a family of twelve.  My husband thought it silly to look that far ahead and convinced me to buy only ten chairs. The room looked magnificent – the long, majestic table, the ten chairs, the buffet, a couple of real ficus, and a few other nice pieces of furniture – I was pleased. The table lasted longer than t
6 comments
Read more