I've been a one busy woman these days. Having an almost 2 1/2 year old keeps me on my toes. Work is busy and it is get sick season. Every little second I get to rest, I usually do it in my comfy pants on the couch next to my hubby (usually about 10 minutes before we fall asleep). On nights when Adam isn't home, I play on my iPhone or the iPad to see what the rest of the world is up to. Social Media. It has brought an entire world together under one little internet button on my computer. Good crap.
When I was growing up (you know, the days before cell phones and when bag phones were considered fancy?) we were always with friends; hanging out with friends, on the phone with our friends, writing letters to our friends. Our friends were usually someone from our math class, our church group, a neighbor... point being, it was usually someone you could relate to. Friends would move away in middle school and after a couple of months of letter writing, they seemed to vanish into thin air. Those friends become a passing thought many years later. "I wonder whatever happened to ______." That's about as far as that went. Occasionally your mom would call you and say she ran into that old friend's aunt in the grocery store and found out she's now married with 2 kids. Whatever. But I digress.
My REAL point is, before all this freakin' technology butted in, we hung out with people we could relate to; people we shared our values and morals with; people who liked the same things you did. Our actual (not virtual) FRIENDS. It was awesome. Now, with all this social media flying around, we have access to people who not only haven't been around in years, but are also not really a person you would normally find yourself around if they WERE around. What I mean is, status updates force you to see what all these people are doing and posting, even if it doesn't jive with your values. It's hard to see these things sometimes without scratching and clawing at a few nerves.
I have friends that I follow on Facebook, Twitter... whatever else site there is.... that I remember from school well over 20 years ago. Were we friends then? No. We were friendLY, but never actually hung out. It's cool how these sites can connect people like that. The down side for me, is that there was usually a reason I didn't hang with some of these people. They didn't share my beliefs or morals or heck, even my love for diet coke. Whatever it was, we didn't jive as well as others. That's normal. Now, I see there rants about their spouses, the hatred for God, the foul language just to describe a sandwich, pictures of inappropriate crap.... I see it. We all do. Sure, these posts usually have 42 "Likes" by them and that's great. But I have been shocked a few times and there's not much that offend me these days.
I am not saying I judge anyone. I am FAR from perfect. I have done some questionable things in my lifetime that I'm not proud of. I have no authority to judge anyone. I could be judged just as easy as any one person in this world. I'm not saying YOU SHOULD BE GODLY PEOPLE AND CHANGE YOUR WAYS! Well, it would be nice if we would all do that, but we are humans that do wrong junk all the time. I just didn't think that people I thought I knew from a long time ago felt so differently about things than I did. I didn't know that as people grew up and began making their own decisions, that they'd choose something so different from the way they grew up. I guess I just didn't realize that what seemed important to everyone when we were youngens living with our parents wouldn't still be important as we grew up and raised our own families.
Social media is good in that we get to reconnect to old friends that once moved somewhere else or went off to school and never moved back. I love that. I love looking at what these friends are doing now. I'm grateful to technology in that aspect. Truly. I just don't think I'll get used to seeing some of the crap people post. We are a free nation. We have freedom of speech, but come on people... where have our social skills gone? Remember when we wouldn't say we didn't like something when a friend had that said thing just to spare their feelings? Where did that go? Why is drama and controversy so loved now? Let's be edgy and say we hate something everyone else loves just to be different. WHY OH WHY?!
I think I have vented enough. I haven't been on here in a while and I'm sorry my first post back is a negative one. I will step off my soap box now, find some funny stuff to laugh at and move on.
Chive on people.
