If it weren’t such a great way for me to keep up with friends
who live far away, I would’ve quit Facebook yesterday for sure. For me, yesterday's FB experience was
like riding on the Gravitron at the county fair.
But with a greater potential for blowing chunks.
You remember the Gravitron, don’t you? Lots of people call
it the Vomitron and so I never had a desire to ride it. I wouldn’t even have
this ride as a frame of reference if someone hadn’t “forced” me on it in junior
high. See, I had an unfortunate Octopus (the ride, not the animal) experience one
summer at Nags Head followed by an even more unfortunate Tilt-o-Whirl
experience (see: projectile vomiting) just moments later. I don’t do spinning
rides…whirling about is not fun for me. But the Gravitron is a little
different.
There is spinning….progressively faster spinning until
finally it reaches a velocity that cements you to your spot against the wall.
So you can do things like try to lift your arm toward the center and have it
forcefully sucked back to the wall – or into your neighbor’s face -- and you can scoot up the wall on your back defying gravity. When it
reaches this speed, you
are moving so fast that you don’t even notice that your spinning. I have to say
that the middle part is totally worth the slight dizziness you experience as it
picks up speed.
It is NOT worth the dizziness that it leaves you with as it
slows down and you once again feel the
spinning.
Thankfully, there was no reverse digestive incident with
this ride – not for me anyway. That would have been an unforgettable junior
high embarrassment (which I avoideded with the Tilt-o-Whirl episode because at
the beach, I was anonymous.) But I did stagger kind of sideways off the ride
which was pretty funny. And then I recovered and that was that.
Facebook was like the Gravitron yesterday. I woke up with
chlorine lung and a smallish headache so it took me a while to get going. After
making lunches and breakfasts and coffee, I sat down with my iPad and started
skimming my newsfeed.
Lots of red cups, but I was too foggy to really read
anything yet. Some stuff going on at the University of Missouri, posts about
weekend football games, more red cups, more Missouri, some Mental Floss, some
meme’s asking for people to chill out about red cups and racial strife on
college campuses (because those are two issues of equal importance,
apparently), then a few cryptic status updates about everyone being offended by
things and the overabundance of outrage and the outrage over outrage. And as the “spinning” gained speed, it was nothing by
red cups whizzing past my face.
Then suddenly, from out of nowhere, I had an overwhelming need for a cup of coffee. So I poured one.
And then I sat down to read
what I had merely skimmed before. That’s when the gravitational pull of social
media stupidity drew me into the wall. It was All. Day. Long. Posts about how
stupid the ONE GUY who started all of this was…posts about what the real war on
Christmas was…posts about how we shouldn’t be wasting our time worrying about
coffee cup décor…memes with red cups that stated all of the above…posts about
the ONE GUY who started it being on CNN and looking like a nimrod (which
shouldn’t have been news because of
course he’s a nimrod) and finally, my favorite, the one about Donald Trump
calling for a boycott of Starbucks because apparently one nimrod deserves
another. I had to READ that article to make sure it wasn’t satire because SURELY a person running for President of
the United States could NOT BE SO RIDICULOUS. But it was real. And it seemed
lost on him…as most reality seems to be…that he hosts a Starbucks in the Trump
Tower.
This is when I almost vomited…two guys interested in NOTHING
but their own relevance…and certainly not interested in how they achieve that relevance…bucking
for dumbass of the year. And the ride started to slow down so I began to get
dizzy again and suddenly it was urgent…
I’ve got to get off this Vomitron NOW.
This critical intersection of reality
and media reality (not the same thing
and when they collide it’s like mixing matter and anti-matter) made me seriously consider deactivating my account. I do not think I would enjoy annihilation -- what Egon Spengler believed would happen
in Ghostbusters if you “crossed the
streams.”
It would be bad.
As the Vomitron lost velocity, I began to focus on other things...to keep me from getting dizzy. Someone posted a beautiful picture of the Aurora
Borealis. Then a picture of a newborn baby. I watched a video of a
really sweet dog who has become a “mother” to three sweet abandoned kittens.
And there was a story about the terminal cancer patient whose dying wish was to
see the new Star Wars film and because Mark Hamill is on Twitter, it happened.
So social media isn’t a complete vortex of absurdity. There’s
some good to be seen. And I wouldn’t have seen any of it if I hadn’t toughed it
out through the fastest and craziest part of the ride followed by the mild
dizziness and nausea that came with slowing down.
When I came to a rest, I staggered away from the experience in
one piece and read a Mental Floss article which explained why we can feel people looking at us…and watched
this video on how to make Barbacoa tacos for my family this week.
Both of these
are infinitely more satisfying and pertinent to my reality than the color of my
coffee cup…or anyone’s opinion on what coffee cups should or should not look
like…or anyone’s thoughts on why we shouldn’t have spent the last 24 hours
obsessing over it.
Next time, though, I think I'll try to bypass the ride on the news cycle and go straight to the food.
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