So Long, Showboaters.

I'm going on a much-needed Facebook break.  I'm not going to do anything to my account, I'm simply not going to check it or use it for a while. 

Here is my list of reasons:

1. I'm so sick of the show-boaters posting pictures of their lives with things like, "My hubby is so wonderful!" and "Our vacation to Italy!" I know it's a jealously thing. My life is crumbling in so many ways, and I watch all these other people with all this money and free time.  It isn't as though I'm incapable of being happy for others, but I'm going through a really hard time, and watching other people's dreams come true is not necessarily inspiring to me. I have the right and the ability to point the proverbial remote control, and turn them off.

2. Simply, I waste entirely too much time clicking around, looking at pictures, memes, and articles. I've really got to stop procrastinating, and get to work.  I have so many other things I have to do in addition to my job. For example: Take my car in for maintenance, schedule speech therapy for my kid, pay more attention to the cats, clean the kitchen, plan meals, do the laundry, get my teeth cleaned, buy valentine's cards for my kid's daycare, bake scones, learn Portuguese, file my taxes, organize paperwork, shred old documents, update this blog...so many things.

3. I've actually limited the number of people who can see my FB posts to about 30 people. That's 30 out of the 200 "friends" I've accumulated over the last 10 years. I've filtered out co-workers, and filtered out relatives, and filtered out friends who have political views that make my skin crawl. I haven't unfriended anyone because I'm tragically passive-aggressive. I hunker down and hope they just unfriend me eventually.

4. When I think about it, I don't have to use FB to contact my friends.  One of my favorite things on FB is a page run by my cousin and her cohorts called Frock Flicks. I managed to get through my post-partum ugly-crying milk-pumping sessions at work by listening to their podcasts.  It's one of the main reasons I log in in the morning. Well, you know, they have their OWN SITE (http://www.frockflicks.com/).  I don't actually have to use FB if I don't want to. 

5. Hey, I still have Twitter. There's something comforting about the fact that most of my followers on Twitter don't know who I am. We've never met. We will never meet. That's okay. The majority of my friends and relatives don't even know I have a Twitter account, and the ones that do? I don't think they really even see it. Twitter is a fun release for me. I can send my aggression and disappointment out into the ether 143 characters at a time. 

So, goodbye for now, FB. I don't know for how long. I'm sure there will be withdrawals for the first week, but I'll have Twitter and Instagram as patches.