Let’s Talk About Facebook…

…doesn’t that sound like fun?

I have an ongoing internal debate with myself over the social networking site that has raging for years. Earlier last week I read that the company will soon be going public and since then I have been thinking about closing my Facebook down (but I think about doing this at least twice a year).

The problem is the pros of having a Facebook are really really great. But there are so very many cons to keeping it.

Reasons to get rid of my Facebook page:
-Too many baby pictures
-Too many wedding pictures
-Too many people hating their job
-Too many people hating their life
-Too many people talking about their babies
-Too many people talking about how much the love their partner
-Too many people talking about being irritated with their partner
-Too many people complaining about not having a partner
-Too many “Jesus” posts: prayers/pleas/thanks/encouragement/etc.
-Too many posts deliberately instigating all the Jesus people
-Too many posts politically charged (in either direction)
-Too many posts about sports/tv/awards/celebrities
-It will force me to reach out to my friends in real life a whole
lot more.
-Too many “life obligation friends:” distant relatives, work
people, friends of friends that I may see socially a few times
a year, relatives I see annually or do not like, etc..

Generally, I’m just annoyed by Facebook. I am not a people person, I do not like most people, and, honestly I would much rather be alone than with most people. And really, as much as I love the narcissistic aspect of “look at how awesome I am!” I do not like actually putting some of that stuff out into the gigantic internet void.

Reasons to keep my Facebook page:
-I like the ease and simplicity of keeping up with my “real life”
friends: seeing photos, weekend plans, etc..
-It makes party-planning and concert-inviting incredibly easy.
-I’ve reconnected with old friends with whom I’ve lost touch.
-We have distant plans of opening an etsy store and the social
networking business aspect is most-likely needed.

Obviously if we are tallying these as a scoresheet, my Facebook page will be terminated immediately. But the positive side of Facebook has a much stronger pull than nearly all of the negatives. Last year in the post-holiday moving mess, I abandoned Facebook for almost three solid weeks and I didn’t miss it all that much.

What I have been seriously considering this past week is scaling back my Facebook in a major way; taking down most of my pictures, not posting directly onto my wall (just letting twitter fill it), getting rid of all my information except one email address, and other less participatory things like that. I have a Twitter account, I have this blog, I have three active email addresses, I just don’t need Facebook. And keeping it that way still allows me to issue event invites/reply to event invites, keep in touch with out-of-town friends that I really do enjoy interacting with even in such a small superficial way, and allows me to keep the account open for the eventual store page/ads. It would also mean that I no longer have to be such a fucking German about who I let into my Friends list (because I refuse to do the “hide” thing or the different group things just on principle). And, by not posting directly to my wall, it will push me to post more on here–even if it is random internet finds I wander across.

I have very nearly talked myself into doing this over the past two or three days…we will see what happens. Do you like your Facebook page?

-K

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under pressure

I have been ultra stressed the past couple of weeks, and have avoided the blog as I have no desire to spew all that negativity all over this place. So, in lieu of several lengthy tense paragraphs, how about a list of all the things I’m super happy about right now?

* We are still absolutely and totally in love with our new house. We didn’t buy it, but man, we may. It’s sososo much bigger than our old place, and new and clean and has a nice flow and we each have our own rooms and it’s just fantastic. Plus Attila loves the new place too, he runs up and down the long hall every day.

*There is hope of spring coming. Right now it may be only 38 degrees, but there have been several days in the past few week where I have oh-so-happily worn my flip-flops. It may not be as good as summer, but at least it’s hopeful. ***[editor's note: I wrote this before work yesterday, and today there is snow {FUCKING SNOW} outside my window]***

*Still loving my job. Love love love. So glad I only work less than half of the time I worked as a clerk in The Shittiest Record Store Ever and make more than three times as much. And I work alongside friends. It’s just awesome.

*Jess is still around. Which I know she’s not happy about; she’d much rather be using her recently-acquired graduate degree than just sitting around and applying to librarian jobs in the apartment at the back of our parent’s yard, but still, I’m so ultra happy that my sister is nearby. And that we have a really close relationship; I feel bad for people who aren’t close to their siblings; it’s really very nice. (Also, how’s THAT for a run-on sentence?!?)

*We’ve already planned out two exciting trips for ourselves this year; one is more of a weekend vacation to one of our favourite cities, but the other is epically exciting for us.

*I’m FINALLY going to be getting my own computer. FINALLY. I’ve not owned a computer of my own since my laptop I was given ten years ago (and it was used when I got it & started falling apart after three or four years). I have since refused to settle for something less than Apple (the expense of which will explain the absence of my own computer).

*We also going to be buying at least one new couch this month. Hopefully the store we found it in will still be carrying it as well as having a sale near this end of the month.

*Ben is handling all my ultra-stress-induced snappiness very well; even being quite sweet and helpful about other things.

*We are breaking our No-Valentine’s rule (not terribly sentimental or romantic people are we; we truly cannot stand V-Day) by going out to our favourite Indian restaurant this year with a group of mostly-single friends (b/c we don’t want to be around sappy couples) to what sounds like an AMAZING fancy buffet.

*I am ever so glad that I am not a passive person; this trait has gotten me into A LOT of trouble in the past, and it makes some things more difficult, but I would much rather be like me than like some other people I know/read/see/hear about who are constantly trying to figure out how to tell anyone anything. (This was inspired by today’s Blogshare, where there seemed to be an abnormal amount of people posting about being passive.)

*And a happy little song with which we can end this happy post:

-K

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The New Family budget

What with a fantastic new job opportunity lined up for me (which I’m just not quite ready to go über public with, just yet) and Ben’s guitar-swirling beginning to really pick up, we’re preparing ourselves to see more money in our household than we have in ages. Although let’s keep our perspective, we’re still going to be at the very bottom rung of the pay scale; now we’re finally going to be able to get one foot off the ground.
We are going to be combining our monies in ways we’ve talked about for years, but I think we’ll finally be able to practically utilize. We’re going to be using what I’m calling the Venn Diagram of family budgets:

Despite being part of Coupledom for nearly a decade, we have always fiercely maintained financial independence from each other. But we realize it will make everything a bit easier if we just finally merge most of our money. We are using this method because, frankly, I’m just too lazy to keep a budget for guitar strings, new speaker cabinets, paint and buckets for swirling and Ben’s sudden cravings for cherry limeades.
Aside from my laziness, Ben (and now me!! [YAY!]) is considered a contract worker. Which basically means taxes are a giant pain in the ass. And a fully merged account would make an already tedious month in late winter even more confusing (especially now there would be two accounts needing to be pulled from it).
We’ve had a collective savings account for years, but we’ve also maintained separate savings and separate checking. We will merge all three savings accounts into one lump account, keep our individual checking accounts and begin a new checking account in both our names with a large-ish percentage of our paychecks put towards it.
But I’ve never created a budget before. Neither for myself nor for us. I mean, in my head, I’ve allotted so much to a certain item, but I’ve never sat down and wrote any kind of structured form for money. And Ben’s idea of budgeting is alternating spending a lot of money and spending no money at all. To help us figure out how much we’re going to need, I’ve been tracking every single penny each of us spends for the past few weeks, and I’ll continue to do so for the next two months. Hopefully, this will help give me a good idea how we should allocate our funds.

I’m curious to see other people’s relationship with money; be they single or moving in together or legally committing themselves to each other . With so many people we know getting married, I’m curious to see how they merge their money. Are you just going with the lump bucket of Everything Earned Is Ours or will you maintain totally separate accounts? How do you handle your money now? And even the ones not part of Coupledom: do you have a set budget and how did you come up with the numbers?
The few people I’ve told about our budgeting don’t seem to understand it. But the people I talk to keep everything totally separate (granted of everyone I asked, not a one of them was married). The daily tallying of our spending has been keeping money on my brain for the past few weeks. And I doubt it’ll go away until I’m used to the whole responsible-adult budgeting/following that budget issue.
This could take awhile.
-K

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On Us and the Interwebz

Oh, the internets. For many many months after we moved into our current housing, Ben and I were too cheap to buy the internet for our own use. (Actually, at first neither of us had a computer, but then Ben went and got his-self a laptop of his very own.) And now we use it all the time.
We both have a myspace page and Ben has two, if you count his band’s page as well. Although several months ago, I drastically reduced everything on that page of mine and only remember to check it every three-four weeks.
We both have a facebook page, although I am becoming increasingly more irritated at the very many changes and privacy options and the general facebook-is-taking-over-the-entire-world-via-the-web. If it weren’t for the easily-accessible ways to keep up with my [actual] friends, I’d be deleting that bitch in a heartbeat.
Recently I have become the last person on the planet to get a twitter account. And really, I like twitter better than facebook if only for it’s bare simplicity.
And my blogs. Oh, how I do love my many many blogs. (And I keep forgetting to add more and more to the blogroll and eventually I’ll remember to do that, okay?) I’m a blog-addict. I think it all stems from my passive nosiness. I want to know what other people are doing without having to ACTUALLY interact with them. Like a low-level spy. As a kid, everybody wanted the flying superpower, not me. I wanted to read people’s minds. But I had read enough of Amelia Bedelia to give my power a quantifier, I wanted to ability to selectively read people’s minds. And that is the beauty of the blog. A brief glimpse into someones world. I read blogs from people all over the country. Some I admire. Some I adore their wit. Some I like their brazen honesty and some I doubt we could ever be real-life friends no matter how much I enjoy reading the life they share online. And others who I would love to meet. I spent many many years as a lurker on several blogs, and eventually in late 2005 I started my own anonymous blog. But I rarely posted to it and most of what I posted could have been read by my grandmother at her little country church. Eventually, when the Rock Star and I planned on moving out of state, we figured a blog would be the easiest way for family/friends to keep up with our lives. Well, we’re still here and it looks like we’re going to be in East TN for quite awhile. But I like the blog now and I think we’ll keep it.

…boy, I chased a pretty fast rabbit there didn’t I?*

But the internets. And Us. And my obsession with blogs is surpassed by Ben’s obsession with forums. He L-O-V-E-S forums. He participates in the music-related ones, mostly ones for seven-string guitar players or … I don’t know, he’s very specific about them, though. I know that.
And YouTube. I like it quite a bit, but Ben LOVES it. He’s always up to date on the latest viral videos and whatnot. Of course, that could be attributed to his many forums as well.
And although we are part of the last generation to know a childhood without the internet; I’m curious about the generation above us. The 30s-40s group that enjoyed a life in their 20s without mass-internet availability. Because, really. How would we spend our time without it?
We don’t have our t.v. hooked up to anything but our gaming systems and our DVD player. So there’s no television for us, but I am curious about aimless time spent wandering over the world wide web and what people did before they could waste their days in such a manner.
In fact, I have a hard time remembering what we did before we had a computer and the world wide web in our house. I honestly can’t remember. I’m sure I read a lot more. And Ben probably wrote more. But, I just cannot remember what my house was like pre-internet.
-K

*”chasing a rabbit” is a phrase I picked up from my not-mother-in-law (which is to say, Ben’s mother) about taking a conversation WAY off topic. I don’t know from whence it originated by I thoroughly enjoy the pure country-esque vibe about it.

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