facestration

I am very frustrated with facebook, but that is sort of inevitable.  Facebook is an extension of our real lives, our real conversations, and I’m often frustrated with those as well.  I think, to some extent, everybody is.  Why doesn’t everybody agree with me, when what I say is so obviously true?  Why does everybody go into an argument with their mind already made up?  Why do people link  to things you’ve seen a dozen times already?  Why do they quote song lyrics, or print poems by famous poets, which are maybe sometimes interesting but add nothing new to the conversation?  Why do I keep coming back?

I had dedicated today to working on my book, the biography I am ghostwriting, and I did get about a chapter and a half done, but I kept going back to facebook ‘just to check in’ and spending an hour, 90 minutes, two hours at a time, and what did I get?

Several frustrating arguments about Israel, a cute picture of goat kids, and a pretty good speech by Allison Lundergan Grimes, which liberal pundits are hailing as ‘historical’ and ‘the end of Mitch McConnell’ and I hope they’re right but it looked to me as if everybody in that audience had their mind made up already and no one was shifted one way or the other.

Then there was the thing that specifically frustrated me, a rather long post by I forget who, about how people are frustrated with people because people are not what people want to he, like collectively, the human race, and I was in the process of coming up with the clever reply to end all clever replies, because that’s what we do, we want to speak our piece, to make our voice heard – most human conversation is just ‘I am here, I am here,’  which is the same as dog language, but before I could write it down, my wife asked to use the computer, for the boring purpose of actually looking up something relevant to our lives.

I said “Don’t lose my place,” but I knew the place would be lost and it was.

The reply I wanted to make was that sure, we’re not as good as we’d like to be, anyone who is as good as they’d like to be is devoid of ambition and, in the end, we are only and  exactly as good as we are.  Before we can get better, however, we need to ask the question: What do we want to be?  What do we, as a species, really want to be?