Someone sent me this:

Hey there you facebook-hater,

I’m forced to con­tact you though the bor­ing medium of gmail, since you are too cool to be on face­book. I guess all the hilar­i­ous com­ments, and inter­est­ing videos and pic­tures that I post are not rel­e­vant to you. That’s fine, I guess if I was a truly inter­est­ing per­son I would know how to make my own per­son­al­ized blog. My per­sonal life’s tapes­try is worth­less in your eyes, because it has been woven with the low class, and eas­ily obtain­able fibers offered by face­book. If every­one can do it, then is must be crass.

But I didn’t email you to lec­ture you on your elit­ist, seclu­sion­ary stance towards all the peo­ple who would like to be your friend and share the inter­est­ing tid-bits of their ever-changing lives with you through an easy, fun, and con­ve­nient social net­work­ing device, which can only invade your pri­vacy as much as you let it…

It’s funny cause I barely said any­thing to him about Facebook. As usual, I just explained that I don’t hate it, but don’t think it’s nec­es­sary for me when I have a per­sonal domain that gives me com­plete con­trol of my con­tent (and pri­vacy). This is my polite answer. But he saw through all that and quite ele­gantly summed up how I feel about com­mu­ni­cat­ing through Facebook in the first para­graph of his e-mail.

A social exper­i­ment to get peo­ple to open up about them­selves, because it’s our lit­tle idio­syn­crasies that make us unique. Maybe peo­ple will learn that they’re not alone in their inti­mate ways as well. In the process, it’s also a way for me to open up more, as I seem to be too care­ful about watch­ing what I say here in recent years, and not writ­ing with the same hon­esty that used to char­ac­ter­ize my entries.

For every per­son who adds a com­ment with the most pri­vate thing they’re will­ing to admit here, between now and Sunday night, I will (try) to add a pri­vate detail about myself. Include a name instead of remain­ing anony­mous¹, be as hon­est and open as pos­si­ble, and only one “thing” per per­son please. I don’t have that many secrets. Or do I?

I’ll start every­one off with a bonus one:

I hate mak­ing my bed. I get it messy (I do a lot of toss­ing and turn­ing) in another 16 hours, so I don’t see the point of mak­ing it. I clean my house in gen­eral when peo­ple are com­ing over because I want them to be com­fort­able, but the bed is a dif­fer­ent story. The only rea­son why I make it is because I feel self-conscious about it, not because I care if it makes my guests feel more com­fort­able. This makes me feel like a phony.

1. Without some sort of iden­tity to bind a detail to, there’s no point to the exper­i­ment. [↑]

Some peo­ple are hurt by the things I say here. But I make no judg­ment; I only speak the truth, sup­ported by the facts. So if some­one is a stalker who blames her prob­lems on the object of her atten­tions, or treats her son like a trained ani­mal, or decides to charge friends and room­mates for rides to the gro­cery store, and I doc­u­ment it here, I’m not the one who’s embar­rass­ing them. They do that enough for themselves.

It’s like a doc­u­men­tary about the Holocaust. The film­mak­ers don’t need to offer an opin­ion that con­demns it. The footage and tes­ti­mo­ni­als speak for themselves.

Sometimes, the peo­ple who don’t like what I have to say are so delu­sional that they sup­ply their own real­i­ties, per­haps because they don’t want to be at fault.

They don’t real­ize it’s the truth that hurts, not me.

The check­out clerks (girls mostly) at my gro­cery store have a strange habit of not acknowl­edg­ing the next cus­tomer until the cur­rent one has paid. So there’s often a point where the cur­rent cus­tomer has passed the cash reg­is­ter to put their gro­ceries in a cart, and they’re just wait­ing for their credit card to go through.

I end up stand­ing right in front of the clerk, who won’t say any­thing, even though you know they see you out of their periph­eral vision. They only say hello as soon as the pre­vi­ous cus­tomer has been rung through. Like they’re com­put­ers who can’t han­dle more than one task per per­son at a time.

It’s quite awkward.