Remember before Facebook, Twitter, Formspring and blogging, when people had these things made of paper where they wrote about their feelings?
And then after they wrote in them, they hid these paper things that they used to call journals or diaries, and then no one else ever had to hear about or see them?
Well, I miss those days.
I never had a journal per se, although every now and then I would pull out a diary someone had bought me and scribble down something pathetic, emotional or sappy, and then hurriedly put the diary back in its hiding place, relieved that I had gotten whatever it was off my chest.
I feel that this was a rather harmless habit, since I was able to express what I was feeling, no matter how trivial or embarrassing, without forcing anyone else to know about it.
Gone are those days.
Gone are the days where if you were having a bad day, you kept it to yourself or your immediate circle of friends.
The new outlet appears to be a sort of cyber therapy – like group therapy, except none of us are actually willing to participate.
I don't exactly remember what the first Facebook looked like, since it has undergone more facelifts than Heidi Montag. But I do remember when statuses were all formatted something like: "Amanda Jonas is…" and then you would usually add something trivial like "going for ice cream" or "doing homework."
I also remember the days when you wrote on someone's wall to invite him or her to hangout, or wish a happy birthday.
That was when Facebook was friendlier, less obnoxious and less of a confessional.
I am so sick of people using Facebook as an outlet for every emotion that they have ever felt in their entire lives. Yeah, I am guilty of n "FML" status and maybe I will occasionally post something sentimental.
But I am talking about the big time offenders, the people we all know who use Facebook as a means of pouring out their souls to hundreds of people who really don't care.
I am friends with this one girl who graduated a year after I did from my high school. Every day, my newsfeed is ravaged by countless statuses about how she has no friends, is always screwed over by boys and how she is never going to meet a boy who truly sees how great she is.
I wish I could tell her to take that Leona Lewis "Bleeding Love" crap and stick it where the sun don't shine.
My friend and I will sometimes look at her wall-to-walls with various people where she, in a public forum open to all her Facebook friends, complains about every facet of her life in grave detail – names, dates and painful paragraphs.
This girl is not alone. I also judge people who throw significant others under the bus with pointed statuses, people who participate in those idiotic surveys like, "Who was the last person you cuddled?" (no one cares), and people who write sappy crap on each other's walls: "My dear sweet noble knight, how I love thee! Sincerely, lowly maiden," (actual wall post that made me want to vomit).
If you have a lot of feelings, that's great – just keep them to yourself. Tell your mom or instant message your best friend, because the rest of us, honestly, couldn't care less.
Plain and simple.
E-mail: asjonas@buffalo.edu
Lock it up
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