Oct 24
It sucks when I want to post something but don’t have enough to say about it to justify an entire post. The problem is mine and it is one of formatting. HTML formatting… CSS style, yo.
See, the structure of this current website theme is controlled by a fairly complicated style sheet using a variety of clever coding tricks. What looks seamless and beautiful to you is actually an intricate dance of background images and DIV tags designed to create an illusion within your browser. And for the most part it works. Sadly, due to both the pathetic limitations of HTML 4.0 and the limited extent to which I can debug a stylesheet before going insane, sometimes the pretty picture gets broken. It has to do with Vertical Sizing. (side note: if you know what that is AND what I mean AND have a reasonable workaround…) Basically, if I don’t write enough to fill, oh let’s say, 30 lines, the formatting of my page breaks down and you get a weird gap at the bottom of the page.
Yes, this is a lame attempt to reach that line quota.
Anyways, the actual point of this post is very simple…
Does anyone else find it weird and even a little bit uncomfortable to read relationship status updates on Facebook?
Jane Smith went from being “in a relationship” to “single”.
Really I don’t care that Jane is single, but I feel like I am quite carelessly witnessing an extremely powerful event. That status update is boring and meaningless to me, but it is still Important because I am sure that it is important to her. What kind of emotional event was it for her to care enough to go into Facebook of all places to declare her independence? And on the flip side, is it now becoming some defining point of a relationship when you can say, “Yeah, Facebook friends, we ARE in a relationship?” **
It may sound stupid, but I know at least two people (I’m not sure I should use their names) who have used Facebook as a means to publicly affirm their relationship status. The girl literally uses her Facebook status in the way that dealers and waitresses might wear a (fake) wedding ring at work. It’s a flag. Don’t hit on me, my current status is “in a relationship.”
It all reminds me of that very, very stupid cell phone commercial where the ditzy girl is talking about deleting people out of her cell phone’s contact list. She says some annoyingly lame woman-empowerment bullshit like, “It’s like he doesn’t exist anymore. See! He’s been deleted!”
God that commercial sucks.
** Language police: where does the question mark go in that sentence?