things facebook has done for me lately

1. A few weeks ago, a friend had the status line "[name] is bored in Heathrow." She was on the way home from Egypt, with her Blackberry. So I sent her a message on Facebook and said, you know, if you're *really* bored, you could stop in a bookshop and pick up the last Harry Potter book in the UK paperback children's edition. A few days later, it was in my hands.

2. This evening after I got back from the big inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial, I was bummed that She Gre wasn't around, so I couldn't go watch the rebroadcast on her cable. Then I learned from someone else's status line that the rebroadcast was streaming on the HBO website, so I watched it right then.

3. A few days ago my status update said I needed a better way to organize my knitting needles...and now J.Po is sewing me a knitting needle organizer thingy! And I'm knitting her an accessory of my choosing! Yay!

status updates

Through Facebook, I have discovered a fascinating new skill: writing status updates. If you are not on Facebook [coughGRRBEARcough] you may not be familiar with this art form. The Facebook status update is a sentence, starting with your name, with a limit of...I don't know, but it's not all that long. You hafta be pithy.

It turns out people really like my status updates. I mean, maybe everybody hears this, but it's happened several times recently: I run into someone I'm friends with on Facebook but don't know all that well, who never leaves comments or anything, and at some point in the conversation they'll tell me how much they enjoy reading my status updates. It's happened enough that I'm starting to believe them.

Two hours ago I posted:
[towwas] temporarily knows three verses of Silent Night, Joy to the World, and Deck the Hall. Should I use these skills for good...or eeeevillll?
It has 11 comments now. And they're funny.

On Tuesday:
[towwas] can't keep Guinea and Guinea-Bissau straight in her head.
That one has a hilarious mix of joke comments (other things with "Guinea," like "Guinea pig") and explanations of the relationship between Guinea and Guinea-Bissau that might actually help me remember the difference in the future.

This has to be a marketable skill, right? I mean, the obvious choice is a non-anonymous blog, but I would want it to be a blog read by 426 very funny people I know personally, and I'm not sure that the google ads would add up to a living. Any other ideas?

I would not recommend eating this

The week between the shows we don't have rehearsal - we're just supposed to, you know, not totally forget the show. On the Wednesday night some of the 20- and 30-somethings (the "aging teens") got together to make:


...a gingerbread model of the set. I made the base out of Rice Krispie treat (which I'd never made before, but let me tell you, not difficult), then we piled pieces of gingerbread from a bunch of gingerbread-house-making kits, then had way too much fun adding people. This is the "Chasse-Galerie" sequence, which included multiple flying canoes (here represented by tootsie rolls).

We made it for display at the cast party, where it was a big hit. You can see a much better picture of the final product on facebook, complete with tags.

366 this year

The last few years I've managed to post exactly 365 items on my blog - one per day. (Some days with zero and some days with five, of course.) Today is the 314th day of 2008 and this is post 295...so I'm totally behind! I'm spending way too much time on facebook and obsessive knitting and stuff.

facebook is killing my blog

I know I haven't been blogging that much lately. You know what? Now whenever I have a funny thought, I put it in my Facebook status line. Instant gratification, no space for exposition, and way more comments than the average blog post. Here are some recent updates:

[my name] enjoyed High School Musical 3, but Ashley Tisdale's old nose was cuter.
[my name] is writing on [high school acquaintance]'s and [high school acquaintance]'s walls and wondering what the heck year this is, anyway? 1992?
[my name] saw Doctor Atomic and High School Musical 3 today. Talk about contrasts.
[my name] values niceness highly.
[my name] didn't go to [university] or study math. But her brother did.
[my name] is singing at Glen Echo tonight. Just as soon as I put some clothes on.
[my name] is ready for the weekend to start. But trying to do a rewrite first. But not really all that enthusiastic. And not allowed to start sentences with And or But.

UPDATE, 11/10: T.Hand points out that I totally stole this from her blog. I would like to say, in my defense, that it was completely non-intentional! I read her post a month ago and forgot about it!!

don't you forget about me

Every time I see that JC Penney back-to-school ad based on The Breakfast Club, I am very confused. Do kids these days even know that movie?

Tonight this ad came on (and question crossed my mind) when I happened to be IMing with a 17-year-old on Facebook. And, whaddya know, she loves that movie. Weird. I didn't know anyone had watched it after, like, 1993.

You learn a lot about current commercials when watching the Olympics. My favorite commercial: this awesome Coke ad with Yao Ming and LeBron James.

fateful day

Nnnooooooooooo!!!!

I guess I could add the new official Scrabble application. Seems kinda disloyal, though. And I had about 10 games in progress!! Dang it. If Hasbro really loved me, it would let me import them. Also, here's a stupid fact I just collected from the internet: The official Scrabble application is only available in North America. So I can't play S.Ev (my Berlin host) anymore.

UPDATE, evening: Actually I think there is also an official Scrabble game for people outside North America, but they can't talk to each other. Or something. Whatever. This I know: It's stupid.

newfangled twittermacating

I know I keep saying I'm never going to take up [your new technology here] and then I give in and do it, but I really hope I never become a person who has to Twitter. In part because it's hard enough to keep up with my blog *and* maintain clever status messages in both gtalk and Facebook. But also because I'm sure I'd never be as amusing as Michelle. (You may know her because I keep linking to her hilarious blog.)

facebook and photography

I take back what I said about Facebook. Scrabulous isn't the best reason for joining. It's fun and all, but, wow, Facebook has so much more point than any of its predecessors. I've had lunch with people I hadn't seen for five or 10 years. (Nice people who I was sorry I'd lost track of, not boring people.) And the christmas show community is all over there - in the last week, half a dozen or so people put up their pictures of May and tagged everybody else and there's comments all over. Lots of fun. Made me feel ok about not carrying my digital camera around.

There haven't been any pictures up here lately because I've been in kind of in a non-digital mood lately. This is partly because my not-so-new employer has a way of making me feel like my pictures, and my visual sense in general, are not only inadequate but also pointless, and partly because I have no backups of the 50 bazillion pictures on my computer and kind of want to back them up before I add more. Also, my hard drive is almost full. Yikes.

I've even dragged out my film camera...so now I have a completed roll of film and have to figure out where to get it developed. Does anyone have experience with snapfish or shutterfly or whatever the heck other services there are to get prints made? Is one better than others? J.Bro, is this the kind of scrapbook-related knowledge M.Bro carries in her head? Or should I just take the film to a store? Will they even know what to do with it?

cousins on facebook

One of the unexpected bonuses of Facebook: reconnecting with distant family members. My cousin (actually my dad's cousin's kid, so whatever that makes her to me) M.Dav lives in Kansas, which means I see her once every, oh, 5 to 20 years. But we're buddies on Facebook, so she let me know she was coming to town for a conference, and today we got together for brunch 'n' scrabble. (Actual, real-life scrabble, rather than the usual scrabulous.)

I had what I think was my best scrabble game of all time. Not only did I play all my tiles twice, I also played a wide range of other outstanding plays. End score was Towwas, 483; M.Dav, 225. If only I could've made 15 more points, it would have been truly awesome. (I had two points in my hand when I went out.) This is M.Dav pretending to look depressed over the final board:


We also went shoe shopping at a comfort shoe store in My Little Town (which is the kind of little town that has independently-run comfort shoe stores that also stock a lot of local-made jewelry and guatemalan handcrafts) and, because M.Dav has the same family foot issues I do, she was able to recommend some excellent shoes. My feet are very excited.

scrabulous

Here's how I hope the Scrabulous thing goes: It ends in some kind of settlement thing where they actually have a game called "Scrabble" on Facebook. And Hasbro and Mattel will make money off it, and everyone will live happily ever after, except for the guys who wrote Scrabulous.

Because, really, Scrabulous is the best reason for going on Facebook (well, that and Superpoke) and I think Facebook knows that and will work something out with the toy people. And the toy people will realize it's good for them if bazillions of teenagers discover their game.

I hope.

You think?

useless ads

Every time I get an e-mail from Facebook telling me that N.Girl, who has a very Indian name, has written on my wall, this is the ad gmail shows me:


Hey! Google! She lives in Arlington! I don't need a ticket to India!

compare me

Facebook has an application that shows you pairs of friends and asks very silly questions like "Who is more punctual?" (Mr. Miss or Spice) and "Who would make a better father?" (Pigpen or this random choir director). So, at right: what my Facebook friends think of me.

And it makes me kind of irrationally pleased. I mean, yeah, I'm not winning "hottest" or "smartest" or anything, but I'll take happy and successful. And best companion on a desert island, whatever that means. I always go for the option with more desert island survival skills (like Mr. Miss), but maybe other people figure, when they're on a desert island, they'll have a real thirst for solo vocal music and interminable stories about my job. I hope so, because I have no idea how to harvest coconuts or fashion tourniquets out of palm fronds.

blog

My blog is boring me these days. I'll have to think of something else to talk about. Here is what's not boring me these days: Facebook. Yes, it was only three short months ago that I declared myself to be over social networking sites. That's ok - I'm a big girl, I can admit I was wrong.

Here are some of the things I've done on Facebook in the last 48 hours:

1. Guessed songs in a christmas show friend's song lyric quiz. Ok, three friends' such quizzes. They're kind of sweeping the nation, or the nation of my D.C.-area music-nerd friends.
2. Been high-fived by J.Po; bought a drink in return.
3. Pwned Spice after she used the force on me. And threw a fish at me. I couldn't just stand there and take it.
4. Made moves in three different Scrabble games, against N.Lu, K619, and a guy I interned with at a newspaper in 2002. (N.Lu and K619 are totally kicking my butt; the guy is my only hope for winning a game.)
5. Posted a link to my work blog. (Know how to find my work blog? We put up a totally funny post the other day. Go read it.)
6. Carried on a "wall" conversation with Miss Shirley about how my friends think I'm punctual and likely to succeed.
7. Compared my friends. (Who's more likely to succeed? who would I rather marry? who has a better profile picture?)
8. Carried on a wall conversation with one of the teens in the Christmas show about how it's cool that all us big nerds find each other at the Christmas show.
9. Played part of a Traveler IQ Challenge game.
10. Watched a video of a bunch of us singing last night at a bar after rehearsal.

...and so on. I remember reading in a story after Friendster fell apart that the problem was, they let you build this great network and then they had nothing for you to do with it. And I thought that was weird - I mean, isn't the fun part just finding old friends? What would you really do with an online social network?

I think I know now.

teenagers are my friends

I joined Facebook a while back because of this quiz. I played it for a while, pretty much maxed out my points potential, and decided it wasn't worth getting carpal tunnel to improve my score further. Also, I'm not sure I *can* improve my score further. So I'm just going to have to continue being #3 in my network. (I made the mistake of telling my super-smart cousin and one of the map guys at work about it.)

I've found long-lost friends on facebook - I now know that my roommate from nerd camp in 1990 works a block away from me, and we're meeting up on Tuesday. You could debate whether it's all that bad to lose track of long-lost friends - if you can't be bothered to keep up by phone and e-mail, why keep up through facebook?

I expected to find old friends, but I didn't expect this: a bunch of my facebook friends are in high school. Of course, facebook is where all the teenagers hang out. This includes all the teens in the christmas show, and one by one they've been friending me. I'm oddly honored by this. And now I get to spy on them and their wall-to-wall conversations about the christmas show. Good times.

facebook

Ok, I have to take back what I said. You know how I declared myself to be over social networking sites? Yeah. I joined facebook. But I wasn't going to socially network! It's not my fault! S.Vix and B.Vas were tempting me with tales of this game where you click on places on a map and you get points and it's awesome. So I joined and, indeed, it was. It's called the World Traveler IQ Challenge and I am no longer #1 among my friends because my cousin Haw Haw is better than me at maps, darn her.

Of course, now that I've joined, I also have to obsessively search for friends on it. Grr. Stupid social networking sites, sucking me in.

friendster is dumb

Ok, it's official: I'm over social networking sites. I got onto Friendster three years ago when everyone else did, found all my friends, acquaintances, and high school crushes, it was all exciting, and - nothing ever happened with it. It just sat there. Everyone shifted over to myspace, I made a vague attempt at a myspace page but never saw the point. Everyone moved on to facebook, I haven't even tried.

And now the one useful function of Friendster is gone. It used to send an e-mail for your friends' birthdays, and it was a handy little tool (except for the people who put in a fake birthdate). Well, in the last week I've gotten messages about two different friends telling me "[Name]'s birthday is almost here!" and a handy button to See When. This little ploy to make me visit their pointless site was bad enough, but I just tested it and it doesn't even tell you when [Name]'s birthday is - it takes you to your Friendster homepage. It took me four clicks to find out that the latest friend's birthday is August first, and, frankly, I didn't care that much - I was in an internship with her in 2002 and haven't seen her since 2003.

Conveniently, this message also came with an "unsubscribe" button. Farewell, Friendster! I'll be getting my social networking without your help!