Facebook Can Be EVIL

I am a Facebook addict.  I admit it.  I currently have over 700 Facebook friends and actively manage 3 Facebook Business Pages.  Facebook (from here on known as FB) can be great - it reconnects you with friends, keeps you in touch with your out-of-town family and can keep you in touch with your friends and plan stuff.  For business, it's great - free advertising!

On the flip side, it can be bad for you.

I think FB is an enabler.  We get to see into our other friends' lives - what they are doing, where they are going, what they have recently gotten.  We can get green with envy or we can portray ourselves as doing better than we are to present a good face.  Other times, I think people post things to throw it in other people's faces.

FB is rampant with cliques (yes, grown women do have cliques...even in their 30's and 40's) posting on each other's walls about what is going down that night for "Girl's Night" or just one or two friends posting about "had a blast this morning!"  or "can't wait to do it again!".  If you happen to be that one friend that was not included, this can quite frankly piss you off.

I will admit I do get jealous when I see that friends of mine have gotten together without me.  Sometimes I would have been able to go, sometimes not, but we all just want to be included.

Then there are times FB can make you feel like a third (or fourth or fifth) wheel.  Friends will comment on stuff you were at or involved in to each other and it would be like you were not even there.  I could go on forever about me and A lately feeling like third wheels, but that's another post for another day.

I've seen this happen to people I know and it's happened to me.  For all the glory FB gets, there's this downside that no one talks about.  It can make a person feel horrible.  Guilty.  Depressed.  Left out.  I do my best not to let the little things get to me, but as a human woman (hormones and all) it does get to you no matter how you try not to let it. And yes, I was inspired to write this post after seeing something posted on FB.

My Tuesday 10

I love to eat.  I go to Weight Watchers because I love to eat.

I present My Tuesday 10...

10 Favorite Restaurants (in no particular order)

1.  Cheddar's (Pooler or Macon, GA)
2.  Spanky's (Savannah/Brunswick/Tybee Island, GA)
3.  Ruth Chris Steakhouse (Savannah/Atlanta, GA)
4.  Barberito's (Statesboro mainly)
5.  Mellow Mushroom (Statesboro or Athens, GA)
6.  Rafferty's (Athens, GA)
7.  Hickory Log (Dexter, MO)
8.  Lambert's Cafe (Sikeston, MO)
9.  Truett's (Atlanta, GA)
10.  Happy Joe's (Muscatine or Iowa City, IA - haven't been there in years, but was my favorite as a child).

Diary of a Former School Bus Rider

Today, as most days, I get stuck behind a school bus on my way to pick A up from school.  The school bus - ugh!  Seeing a school bus, no matter where I am, makes me cringe.  Seeing a school bus always invokes painful memories of being made fun, picked on and taunted.

In Jackson, Missouri if your mom did not stay home all day, if you did not lived close enough to walk or had an older sibling pick you up, you rode the bus.  Everyone rode the bus.  This was the thing I dreaded most from 6th grade until I was a freshman (my sophomore year got better - I had friends with drivers licenses :)  I remember at least one day a week I would come home and cry after getting off the bus.

See, I was the fat girl on the bus.  Looking back, I was not big at all by today's standards, but I seemed to always be the biggest girl.  As like a majority of them, middle school boys can be mean - very mean.  I was always the target of fat jokes and the such.  I vividly remember buying a candy bar (okay, I know) from someone selling them for a club fundraiser and these 2 boys - Travis and Mark - started up.  It took everything I had to act like I couldn't hear them and try not to cry.  These are the same 2 who taunted me for a week after falling down on the way to the piano in the 6th grade Talent Show (I went on to play a perfect "Fur Elise" by Beethoven with a room full of happy applause, thank you very much :)  

I'm sure everyone has those moments from school they can't forget no matter how hard they try.  We aren't perfect.  We've made fun of people and have had people make fun of us.  I think this just helped me develop a thick skin for that kind of ridicule.  It's funny though, once we got past 9th grade (which was located at our junior high/middle school) everything stopped.

The 2 boys?  I don't know what happened with one - he just kinda faded into ordinary.  The other, he started dating a girl 2 years older than us, "fell in love", they ran off from their parents bound for Vegas to get married (he was 16, she 18) but got apprehended by the cops somewhere in Colorado (I think it was...) after their parents alerted the police.  They broke up a year later.

I'm thankful that A goes to a school that they only way you would ride a school bus, is on the way to a field trip.