Reflections on 9 Days of having a facebook account

Sunday night of the week that has passed I was speaking on the phone with my girlfriend, Alexandra.  A picture of her grandmother was mentioned, and that there was no way to see it. Really there was just no way for me to see it as it was posted on facebook.  In this moment I was next to my computer which was on and had two bars of the linksys broadcast by a benevolent unknown neighbor.   I tried to register for a facebook with my gmail account, but it was taken, my own address was currently in use, or had at one point by someone who opened a facebook.  This is a mystery with various possible, probably very boring, explanations.  I luckily have, like any reasonable person, another email account, and Andrew Shaw-Kitch the facebook account was born on the same day as his brother (that is real Andrew's real brother, which also happens to be Earth Day).

Alexandra seemed concerned by my sudden decision.  She didn't want me to join, and I didn't really want to either, so I promised us both it would only be a brief experiment.  I really just wanted to see this picture of her grandmother.  This disappointment that she expressed about me getting a facebook account has not been uncommon.  My friend Brandon was one of my first friends to "post on my wall"—


I really didn't want to accept your friend request on principles. You were my anchor! Proof that not everybody did social networking. Goodluck on your Facebook adventures...you're gonna need it.

—and he made it sound like I was starting a really lame hero's journey, crossing into a Mordor whose evil was composed of self-aggrandizing, solipsistic triviality.

One does not simply walk into a facebook account, especially in 2012.  I have been meeting people for half a decade and either disappointing or impressing them by not having a facebook.  So conversely I was now pleasing or disappointing any real friend who could now be my facebook friend, confusing and even worrying some.  My friend Ian commented on Brandon's wall post


 it is probably just so he can deconstruct it

My friend Jaymee "like"d this.  I also just did right now.   It is quite easy to research the history of one's facebook use.  My "Wall" tells me in reverse chronological order everything that I have ever communicated or had communicated to me, so I have it open now, and while I literally liked my friend Ian's comment a few days ago, I did not "like" it until just now.  It's almost as though facebook intended its users to research and write critical or personal essays about the history of their posting, liking, sharing, commenting, etc.

The Mt. Doom ring-tossing of my "adventure" is not necessarily a deconstructionist critique on facebook as Ian speculated. My initial intention was just to see this photo of Alexandra's grandmother (Alexandra modified her hair to a bright blue in the black and white photo), but something greater than that tempted me across the threshold: loneliness.  I felt left out in recent months more than I ever did in the past.

Last month I noticed that the steps in front of Monterey City Hall were vacant for the first time since January.  Jimmy, who had been holding an occupation "vigil" at those steps and who I tried to visit and chat with on a regular basis was nowhere to be seen, gone from the spot where for months I had taken his presence for granted.  Later that night I saw Christopher—known as Cowboy Starr in certain circles—who is active in Occupy Monterey's media presence.  "Where the fuck is Jimmy?!" I asked him.  Apparently Jimmy had a big going-away party.  He's going somewhere to record an album.  It was all over facebook the week before.  And I didn't even get to say goodbye!

I also am an writer who is not an Writer (not that people frequently capitalize the word, I just like the idea of saying "a capital W Writer" because John Barth and DFW did it).  In the economic terms that define our reality, I am a substitute teacher/restaurant host who has bourgeois potential.  The only creative occupation I have is my weekly job hosting an open mic in Seaside on Sunday, and I am compensated for my work with free coffee and donuts.  We recently got an alcohol license and I have gotten a two-beer-a-week raise.  To consider myself a writer is, at best, beside the point, and, at worst, delusional.  If I consider it a hobby then I take it a little too seriously; if I consider it a life purpose then I don't take it seriously enough, or I haven't made it into a serious enough reality.   This feeling is emotionally and psychologically debilitating to say the least.  Why not create an online persona who seriously resembles me and who happens also to be a writer?

A few months before at a moment when I was actively and self-consciously being a writer (this seems like a ridiculous notion: actively being a writer.  But it just means I was prioritizing my time so that I could write every day): the restaurant I work for became involved in a facebook group called "40 days of writing," begun by the fiancée of a wine writer that my boss liked.  Instead of joining a community of people who were actively and self-consciously being writers, and while helping to create writing about wine four days a work at the restaurant, I sat in isolation at my computer, with my books and notebooks.  Instead of participating in a virtual world as a writer (the world of writing is ultimately always virtual anyway) I was composing in a vacuum.  And is unread writing even writing?

On Sunday, April 15th the couple came, on their honeymoon, to the restaurant to film a conversation with my colleagues, my boss and me about our experience of writing about wine creatively as a way of studying it.  I edit my boss's weekly blog posts, help to write descriptions for the wine list, and for this project I mostly edited and helped compose haikus, acrostics, concrete poems and other writings about wine (my position does not require that I be an expert on wine).  I mentioned, in this conversation for the pending film, that it was a kind of dream come true for me to get paid to be the resident authority on writing, that in some way it is the most official moment in my life as a writer, even if it was as the host in a restaurant.  On Wednesday an article I wrote was published in the Pacific Grove Hometown Bulletin, in which a review of my book was also published, and by the next Sunday, my brother's birthday, I opened a facebook.  I announced that I was a writer and every time that is read it becomes a little more true.

(It has now been nearly 3 weeks since I opened my facebook account, and I finished and edited the first part of this essay [that I began 9 days after its inception] today when I started the second part "Reflections on nearly 3 weeks of having a facebook account."  I have [in the 4 hours away from my computer] decided instead that the essay [in progress out of necessity] should be written as it develops in one post.   This whole thing seems insanely narcissistic—to write a blog about having a facebook.  And really the facebook is in turn about "my life as a writer," making a loop that connects the content of my life expressed on facebook with the theory of my critical studies expounded in this blog; linked in the single inevitable post of this essay on my wall.

I went to a picnic on my 16th day with a facebook and it felt like a glorious expression of a spring day. People I knew from around town showed up and eventually, after throwing a frisbee around a little, it was proposed that we make a human pyramid.  And we did, just as my friends and I did in Seattle 5 years ago, in a park on a sunny glorious day.  This second pyramid has in the past few days become very symbolic of what it is I want to say both on and about facebook.  However, it is almost the definition of anti-social to intellectually deconstruct a human pyramid as opposed to being in it, falling apart with it, and liking it later on facebook.  But I don't want it to be confused that I did not sincerely enjoy being in the pyramid, friends new and old; it just means something new to me that I could reference this pyramid to close friends of mine without having talked to them and they would know to what I was referring.  More on the importance of the pyramid later.  First the rest of the writing from today and then...)

The rules of my facebook experiment were imposed by my circumstances.  I have a decade-old eMac that picks up generally 1 or 2 bars of lynksis wireless internet at its spot underneath my bedroom window (sometimes 3, sometimes 0).  I otherwise get internet access when I substitute teach (however, at elementary school facebook is blocked), at the library, and at the Alternative Cafe on Sunday nights when I host a weekly open mic.  When I first tried to share this information and to ask seasoned users if it was socially acceptable for a grown up to go to the library to check his or her facebook, I found that, due to the antiquity of my operating system, I could not

1.  Post words without a picture or link onto my wall or someone else's

2.  Look at a photo album without my internet crashing

3. Comment on people's photos, posts, comments, etc.

The posting realization came out of a frustrating afternoon when I actually managed to post an update without a picture:

For the fourth goddamn time I have tried to explain why I am posting these pictures but the link I put in to this box made everything else I wrote disappear and the comments I have attached to these other photos have not appeared, and I am afraid if I try again my internet will crash again, and that if I give up now I fail in my attempt to have a facebook. But I have dedicated the last 30 minutes to this and not to gardening on a fucking beautiful Saturday.

Brandon advised me quit while you're ahead and Lucy asked Andrew, what has happened?!??!

What has happened is as of yet not completely certain.