Hell and gone from Cartagena

If you've come this far, then you either curious what the hell is going on, or you're super pissed and you had some final comment you wanted to share. Or I owe you money...

There are many reasons to walk away. For one, I miss my friends. I miss them as people. Facebook made them photos and quick comments. They had lives I was not a part of, but could witness from afar. I missed their voices, their phone calls and all of our well-thought out attempts at communication. Facebook is none of these things. It has become a cheap way to hide from my friends and have an even more shallow relationship with them. That's not what I need from my friends.

I had 670 friends stacked up in a pile on Facebook before the hill collapsed under its own weight. I decided it was time to start focusing on the reality of friendships and avoid the two dimensional ones which dominate the internet. Facebook is like eHarmony with only one dimension of compatibility. As much as I travel, I rarely saw any of my friend's faces in person. They preferred me only on Facebook.

It's not that I didn't enjoy the online chatting, but there must be a much more intimate way to communicate than "pokes" "likes" "terse commentary" and creative uses of punctuation. None of which I can figure out. Call me. Text me. Write me a note. If we live close, meet me in person. I will try to return that favor. I just didn't feel like much was real in my social life with 670 friends.

Facebook fought me tooth and nail every step of the way. You can't just walk away from Mark Zuckerberg's little experiment. You have to UNLIKE everything you have liked. You have to delete all your emails and they are ALLLL in there. They won't let you DELETE them per se, but rather ARCHIVE them. Then you have delete all of your PICTURES. And each of these action requires three steps or more to complete. It took me three plus hours to get all of my information off Facebook and it still wouldn't let me go. It kept suggesting friends from my "previous" high school and from "former friends." It felt like a computer glitch. Or as someone so aptly put it, "Facebook is a psycho ex who won't let go."

The final step is unfriending all the faces you see every day. It's weird how much comfort you take in them. The first two hundred people weren't that hard - I barely knew most of them or had never met them in person (mostly disc golfers, or burlesque dancers or businesses). The next two hundred kinda stung a little but I began to rationalize their unfriending by saying, "well... the sex wasn't THAT good." or "I'm not sure they even use Facebook any more." The next hundred were people I knew could call me or email me and say, "HEY, what the fuck? Why did you unfriend me?" And I'm prepared for that text/call, so I wasn't concerned. Though, to date, I have not received one of these calls/texts. The next hundred were close friends; people I adore; my favorite people to keep up with on Facebook. It was the last seventy people that hurt the most.

It took three days of deleting people to get to the final seventy. It began to feel like some odd game. "Who is gonna be the last one?" It was at this point that I started receiving emails from people who realized I was gone from their feeds and friends list. "HEY! What gives?" and "You're one of the only people I read on Facebook" emails started piling up in my freshly cleaned out inbox. It was then that I decided to dust off my old bloggy persona and continue to post my snarkiness so those of you who enjoyed it can continue to do so. Thus, the birth of this bloggy - The third in my history. I had forgotten how good it feels to write one of these. It's far more refreshing to write in this TEXT box like I'm writing an essay, than it is writing on Facebook.

The final twenty friends were my last bastions that I wanted to hold on to because I wasn't sure if they had my email. Eventually I just had to give up the ghost and knock them out. NAME REMOVED BY REQUEST was the winner as the last person deleted. It hurt to watch all of you disappear from my chat box and newsfeed. But when the screen fell silent and there was nothing left to look upon, I felt pretty good.

No. I'm not going back. And NO, they won't all be this long. I promise to write short smut for those of you who miss it.