Second verse, same as the first...

Today I'm trying not to avoid finishing draft job applications. It's pretty hard though, the job and person specifications for the things I'm going for are so uniform and identical that it's difficult to think of ways to rephrase the same thing over and over again. Well, it was difficult, when that was still what I was doing. I've now sort of compiled one job generic application containing my best answers to all the questions everyone asks that I can reword and modify before banging out answers to the two or three unique questions they throw in to make sure you're paying attention and emailing it away, over the churning waterfalls, off the edge of the world, into the endless abyss. Or something.

I've been doing rather a lot of this lately, and have now reached the worst point in the whole process, the part where your fate is in "their" hands (you know, THEM). Every phone call from a private number is greeted by a blurting, jittery, twitching mess. Logging into my "professional sounding" email address has started to resemble an action film sequence, wherein your hero sweats bullets whilst defusing a bomb, only in this version he's very disappointed at the end when nothing happens. It's like some weird splicing of The Hurt Locker and Marvin the Martian.

It probably doesn't help that my birthday is rapidly approaching, a fact I only recently realised, which is concerning as it's not just my birthday, but also my sister's. This year my birthday is a doubly significant anniversary, as it also marks one year since I was admitted to practice. That's right, I've "been a lawyer" for almost a year now. That fact, taken along with my failure to break into my career in any lasting way, and my hastening progress towards 30 has me in a decidedly weird mood; an emotional state compounded by my numerous (and very boring) anxieties.

I shall not dwell on this any longer, as it is one of a growing number of things at the moment that seems to bring on a strange sort of chest pain. I find this quite uncomfortable, and a little disturbing, though I have chosen to dismiss it as a previously unexperienced emotional response. I presume (or at the very least, hope) that the difficulty is existential rather than cardiovascular, though it makes little difference really. Either way, the matter shall resolve itself, and in any event in the long term the outcome is the same.

Anyway, enough of that depressing stuff. I feel compelled to give a quick rundown on how my new adventures in trying to use facebook less are going (Previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer...). I have so far managed the transition quite well, pestering my friends from afar via my newly linked twitter account, bashing out my rants on this blog and only using facebook for the things that it is actually good at doing. On a recent snoop about to check on comments I noticed that the Notes app has not been importing blog posts from my RSS feed as it should, and that only the very first post has appeared. I shall have to log in at some point and try to remedy this, if only to further avoid looking at my many job applications.

Outside of my apparently stalled career things have actually been going very well of late. I have achieved many of the things I set out to do in my first post, and am generally finding the more active, productive and imaginative use of my leisure time to be extremely enjoyable. The radio show has been excellent, giving Emma and I a shared hobby and an opportunity to share our great love of music with others. New friendships have brought me a great deal of joy, as has a strengthening of old ties.

Another thing that has been wonderful is breaking away from this computer and really enjoying evenings out again. I am out and about at gigs and things most weekends, having a great time and amassing a vast treasure trove of demos and EPs. I am glad to be back in the thick of it again, as I sort of dropped out for a while there, when I was a little fragile after making my big decision and committing to the straight edge lifestyle. It's coming up on 8 months now, and as Emma pointed last night, this is my first birthday without drink or drugs in a very long time. There are, I suppose (and grudgingly concede), some things to be cheerful about this birthday.

I will leave you with an odd thought I had last night, shortly before I fell asleep, on the topic of casual swearing (a subject very close to my heart). What is it that makes some words worse than others? Many obscenities are colloquialisms for the male and female sexual organs. There is one word, I presume you all know which one, that is considered far and away the worst, many regard it as unusable. Why is that? There are many curse words for that very same anatomical feature that people feel quite comfortable using in polite company, even in front of children. They are not beeped out on television or radio. Wherein lies the terrible power of the c word? Any thoughts?

The Tyranny of Convenience

The most recent facebook update really pissed me off. A lot. My immediate reaction was to lash out and complain about how a service that I used for everything and relied on everyday had suddenly changed in a way that I found very detrimental. Now, having chewed over things a bit, I'm glad facebook has changed, because it's helped me to realise that there's a big problem with facebook that has nothing to do with the most recent set of changes to its appearance and functionality.

To be fair though, it's not really a problem with facebook. It's a problem with us; the users. We've let facebook become too big a part of our lives. We've allowed the convenience of a website that does everything, and is used by everyone, to make us lazy and a bit stupid.

Facebook is just a website; a website that does a few things very well and a lot of things very poorly. It is, for example, a very good organising and promotion tool, allowing us to invite huge numbers of people to an event or make them aware of a product or service. It is, on the other hand, not very good at photography. There are many websites that do this better, allowing us to upload high quality images and edit and share them, while protecting our privacy and copyright. We use facebook for photos though, because it is an easy, convenient way to share our pictures with large numbers of people. When facebook is concerned, convenience trumps quality, and we allow it to handle aspects of our lives that other websites do better purely because it's easier to let facebook do everything in one simple step than it is to figure out how to do it ourselves.

When the new update made facebook less easy and convenient for me to use, the illusion was shattered. As soon as the convenience of facebook diminished, it became apparent to me that it actually wasn't really worth getting upset about. Facebook wasn't really any better or worse than it already was. Sure the new layout sucks and it's hard to navigate, but I quickly realised that the real problem was me. I was a fucking idiot, because I had let myself become too reliant on facebook.

So I thought about deleting my account, but there were too many reasons to keep it. Promoting my radio show, organising my social calender, sharing pictures on the fly, keeping in touch with some people I can't realistically contact any other way; facebook is still useful for these things, and giving up these things because of facebook's many failings would really just be cutting off my nose to spite my face.

I was washing the dishes at work yesterday when I had a much better idea. Instead of deleting my facebook account I would try to use facebook the way I did when it was new.

I decided to only use facebook for things that it was actually good at doing. I'm going to use the internet more intelligently, and seek out the best ways of doing things, rather than relying on the convenience of facebook. Right now I'm typing a post on my new blog. I've linked my new blog's RSS feed to the Notes app on facebook. Now I can share my ideas and my writing with all of my friends on facebook without having to log into facebook. I've done the same thing with my twitter account, which means I can post status updates, links, pictures and videos to my wall without ever having to log into facebook. I can do lots of the things I normally do on facebook, using better services, with better interfaces, and still gain all the benefits that facebook offers.

I decided to not check facebook every 15 minutes, or to sit on it all night. You know why? Because it's fucking sad. I never realised I did this until the new update made it difficult and less enjoyable. I'm going to go out there into the world and do some fucking awesome shit, and I'm going to do a lot of casual swearing while I'm doing it. I'm going to watch movies, see bands, spend time with my friends, go skateboarding, swim in the ocean, walk through a forest and then I'm going to come back home and type up a blog post about it and you can read about it on facebook and then maybe come here and read some more and leave a comment.

I decided that there were a lot of things that I didn't even really need to use the internet for at all. Recently, before all this facebook crap, a friend and I decided that we would write each other letters. A long time ago I used to write letters and I am sad that I ever stopped, because doing it again has reminded me of a fact that I had forgotten for some time. Letters are fucking awesome. There's no character limit and you can attach what ever you like to them and as a general rule nobody sells them to advertising companies.

They make you better at writing. They make you think about things a little more deeply. Also, receiving them is awesome, it's a wonderful thing to go out to your letterbox and find something other than hardware catalogs and your gas bill in there, and know that someone cares about you enough to take the time to write you a letter. I would rather receive one letter than a million wall posts. If you want to receive a letter, email me your postal address and I will send you one.

Well now it's time to see how this whole experiment goes. Hopefully I can follow through on these decisions and start enjoying my life a lot more. I'm looking forward to typing a lot more blog posts, about things that are better and more interesting than facebook.