Confessions of a Likeaholic

I knocked on her screen door.

I could hear her dog bark.

"I got your e-mail. This can't be happening again."

"I know I promised you I wouldn't."

"Put the damn mouse down...look at me.

This can't go on.

I saw all the posts today.

You're completely off the charts with this.

You've littered so many comments it's obscuring the really valuable thoughts, links, images.

You wanted my help and now you've betrayed me.

Your life is unmanageable."

"Don't say that, I have feelings. I asked you to come by for some real help and advise...again."

"What is it, don't you care about others?

Yesterday you made a decision to limit yourself rather than go cold keyboard."

"I know, I'm sorry...that's why I had to get you back here."

"You were only going to stay with two a day."

"I know, I knoooowwww....and I didn't even finish my shower this morning! I ran out with the water running. Facebook was already on the screen and I clicked 7 "Likes" and ran back."

"Holy...now you're even a danger to yourself! Listen, this Facebook thing is an interactive tool; your life is your message to others. You've gotta direct your energy into the proper channels.

Its been said, "If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." Stop "Liking" and start writing."

"That's too deep."

No it's not. I've told you before, you're a bright young woman, you'd be surprised if you "write"  instead of "like". Something happens in a magical, soulful part of the heart...and you see YOU. You see yourself."

"I can't look at myself."

"The unexamined life is not worth living", so said Socrates.

 C'mon, it's not that hard. Think of it this way then. It's like tie-dying a t-shirt and Facebook is the big vat of dye. This one pot of  dye dissolves with the things or comments dyed in it..and then you get colored just by jumping in. You change, we change. When you don't see it for what it is, you miss the whole point...Facebook Consciousness.

Don't you see, every thought, every action throughout the day MUST be shared with everyone. What you had for breakfast; the speeding ticket you got, your dog's latest accident, what you're watching on TV!, the weather, why and how I cut my finger"

"You are mad, please leave now, you have gone insane right before my eyes!"

"What's wrong, what did I say?"

"Are you kidding me?! That's not what it is all about! That's not it AT ALL!

If I've discovered anything, from my obsession with "liking", it's that it makes me reflect every now and then on the one basic truth-that all we ever really have is all we are. I'm reminded of Yeats when he says, " The memory is a living thing-it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives-the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead." Facebook becomes our collective journal. As Susan Muto has said,"Thus the emergence of self is a continuous event. We never arrive; we are forever arriving..."

"You amaze me. I stand corrected."

And one last thing about my "like" addiction...allow me to read you this comment off the screen that I blessed with a "like" before you woke up my dog,

"Is wind like music?

Is music like wind?

Each experience is a seperate reality.

A birds sky laced with clouds and branches,

We know nothing

of it.

It knows nothing

of my noisy air conditioner.

And yet we are

inmates of the same

molecular soup we call

Life."

"Do me a favor? "Share" that one onto my page, okay? I'm going to have to think about that one a little more."

"Right. You better go now, I have to get to school."