UTMC

Anti FB rant, ignore at your leisure.

This is why I avoided FB for as long as I did, and why I won't fuck with it again. Being that I am the parent of two twenty-somethings and a child in the late stages of teenagery, I am fully versed on WTF it is, and having moved from home to Texas my wife finally relented and got a "profile" to keep up with her old pals. So being the curious sort I check it out from time to time, although generally I don't care about who is playing Zynga or whatever bullshit people feel the need to pass on to the world. But the other day my 23 y/o daughter, who is living with us having just begun a new career after school, changed her status from in a relationship to single. She has been with the same douchey loser for about three years now, but despite that she did really care about him. Naturally given the length of the relationship he is a FB friend of ours as well, and about the same time we were notified that he changed his status (so it must be fer realz yo). So I sent a note to my daughter, as a joke because she was in the other room, consoling her and the next thing I know I get a message from Douchey McGee asking why we didn't comment on his status. Hey buddy, all things considered this is my daughter vs someone who is no longer a factor in our lives, who the fuck do you think I am going to console? Seriously, did FB breed this kind of gall that people think that we will all stand side by side and hold hands forever no matter what? Your relationship is over, I can turn my back on it now and you should be able to as well.

tl;dr: fuck facebook, fuck stupid ppl.

yes, people are dumb, needy attention whore assholes. yes, the *look at me* generation expects immediate and universal attention in exactly the manner in which they imagine they are entitled to it, or they get all prickly. ignore them. ride your motorcycle. love your kids. eat the best barbecue. live, rather than circle jerking.

Your story is interesting, although I don't quite agree with your conclusions.
Quite apart from holding hands forever, he might expect a comment on FB because that whole non-individualistic way of experiencing life, where everyone you know weighs in on everything that happens to you, is what FB has bred into him and others like him.
He doesn't just know you on FB, he knows you in real life, which, while the line is disturbingly blurred for the FB crowd, is still separate and might be valued more highly, so a major change in his circumstances would, he perceives, warrant some communication, especially since it involves someone even closer to you than him.
OR he might have honestly misunderstood the relationship he had with you, considering you friends and all that, in which case he might have expected a goodbye of some sort. Should this be the case, the first might still apply and consequently hurt even more.

In any case, FB is just another incubator for useless drama, as evidenced by you (justifiably, mind) carrying it in here. This is how it spreads it's ugly tentacles, making us discuss it with our peers. Even if that discussion isn't on how it's a good thing (which it isn't), but just an entirely reasonable gripe. No such thing as bad PR and all that.
Also, I really mean it, I'm not criticizing that you carried it here, I probably would have done the same.

Also, a quote about Teddy Roosevelt I heard today comes to mind.
"At weddings, he wanted to be the bride, at funerals, the corpse."

save us from people who don't think, react, believe and behave as we do. lol FB, blogs, chatrooms, boards, CB radio, the telephone, pencil & paper...just mediums that expose the inconvenient truth that most people just don't like most people.

so, umm, your daughter's single you say . . . .

Just how may I access this faceybook thing and, well, what is your daughter's profile. . . .

Facebook is like a gun


It is what you make it

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
-Cicero

Believe me I hate the irony of going online to bitch about people bitching online. It just seriously chaps my ass. When in my past I would leave a girlfriend, I never expected to get any measure of sympathy from her family. You make the decision that it is over and you fucking face the reality of that. Yes we were close with this guy, but the operative word, once a breakup occurs, is "were". I know it is probably me being sensitive, and it could have been a tongue in cheek response on his part (easy to misinterpret in internet communications), but I feel genuinly put out that someone would question the reasoning behind consoling their child in favor of anyone else in the world.

Oh, I completely agree with you. Just don't think it can be chalked up to "Dang kids and those google machines" people have always been assholes, probably always will be.

piccini9 wrote:Oh, I completely agree with you. Just don't think it can be chalked up to "Dang kids and those google machines" people have always been assholes, probably always will be.

While that is true, vanity driven always-on shit like FB is a total asshole enabler. Used to be, anyone saw something you wrote or put on your private little website, someone had to actually go look for it and deal with whatever layout and stuff you picked. FB neatly packages everything, making it that much easier to be a vain douche.

so, back to the important stuff... is her status still "single"?

pix?

More serious, really, do you even want to have a "comment" on your status/employment/personality or anything else from your exes parents? WTF? I would just hope they didn't say anything rather than well anything. Good, bad, whatever . . . I would just want to move along with as little friction as possible.

Giving the kid a lil credit, it may have just been a knee jerk reaction to an overload of the crap you go through during and after a break up. Much more weird if he's like that in 3 months.

^^^ I'd agree with that. It's a different generation, who grew up with a very different method of social involvement. This fully connected, all the time thing strikes me as odd, and I use facebook a lot to keep in touch with friends all over the country.

I'd be inclined to give the guy a break. He's 23, just got dumped by someone he was seeing for 3 years. Unless it's crystal clear to him you hated the guy it isn't unreasonable for him to reach out using a familiar means. I got along great with several of my ex's parents and some of them were sad when we split up.

stiles wrote:^^^ I'd agree with that. It's a different generation, who grew up with a very different method of social involvement. This fully connected, all the time thing strikes me as odd, and I use facebook a lot to keep in touch with friends all over the country.

I'd be inclined to give the guy a break. He's 23, just got dumped by someone he was seeing for 3 years. Unless it's crystal clear to him you hated the guy it isn't unreasonable for him to reach out using a familiar means. I got along great with several of my ex's parents and some of them were sad when we split up.

Actually he's 30 (Goose, she likes older men!!!) but whatever. And yeah, I too have had great relationships with my ex's parents but I accepted the loss of them as part of the deal. In fact my other daughter just went through a breakup a few months ago and I liked that guy much better, but again I am not going to mix up my child's emotions by prioritizing my relationship with that person over theirs.
I guess we are getting into a deeper issue of family values. All this being said, my wife has no problem keeping in touch with the girl's exs, even keeping up with an old old boyfriend from like five years ago. Sorry, that makes me cringe, move on dude. There are benefits to being married to a MILF, but as it is becoming more and more obvious, there are some drawbacks as well.

Timely thread. I gave up Facebook this past weekend.

With a few very rare exceptions, I only "friend" people on FB that I ordinarily wouldn't otherwise contact.
My own MOM isn't "friends" with me on bookface. I want to say something to my mom, I call her.

I continue to laugh at anyone with a Facebook account.

happycommuter wrote:I continue to laugh at anyone with a Facebook account.

Me too.

I'm with Motorpsycho, FB is just a communications tool. It's all in how you use it. I'm not a very social person, even less so when you consider that most of my friends have scattered themselves around the US or other parts of the planet. I like having some contact with them on a regular basis, instead of a game of phone tag and then maybe a real conversation once every 6 months.

One thing though, anyone who gets into those FB fantasy games, or needs to use it as their own personal drama broadcaster gets deleted. My friends don't play that shit.

I joined Facbukkake to keep in touch with some band-mates who use it exclusively as a communication tool.

It is a douche-enabling device.

Bigshankhank wrote:

happycommuter wrote:I continue to laugh at anyone with a Facebook account.

Me too.

That makes three.

If people want to keep in touch with me, or vice versa, we have eachother's phone #s and email accounts.

motorpsycho67 wrote:Facebook is like a gun


It is what you make it

Yup. I've heavily segregated my FB to folks I give a shit about and those I don't. I can't remember the last time I looked at the latter.

Bigshankhank wrote:

happycommuter wrote:I continue to laugh at anyone with a Facebook account.

Me too.

And spoken movie will never work.
Like it or not (I sort of love-hate it) it has become a mandatory tool in some work areas. As much as I use it like a hamster on drugs, it got me some interesting professional contacts and some people I work with would laugh at me if I didn't have one. Until it fades out and it's something else. It's a fax machine or a typewriter.

I'm alright with FB, you can choose who to pay attention to and who to ignore, some people put up cool shit (Priest posts more tattoo pics there for instance, which I enjoy) and every now and then an old friend surprises you by doing something truly cool. Plus the odd surprises, like seeing pictures of an old friend blossomed into an astonishingly beautiful women at a wedding, and seeing pictures of one of my exes at same said wedding, having gained enough weight to make me wonder if she had eaten a similar sized girl. A good chuckle, a bullet dodged.

But seriously, I hardly recognized her, weird.

/RM