I said yesterday that I would refrain from complaining about my back pain today and find something truly frivolous to write about.  And when one thinks of the ultimate famous forum for fabulous frippery and first class frivolity… (not surprisingly)… Facebook comes to mind.  Months and months ago, Macca-me-mate sent me an invite to join Facebook, and I managed to resist the temptation at that point, but as no doubt has been experienced by many internet dwellers, all good fads come to those who wait…. eventually… and I signed myself up a couple of months ago.

Some people love it, and some people hate it.  It’s a bit hit and miss for me – there’s some big upsides.  One of which is finding old acquaintances.  So far – I’ve managed to catch up with a few old friends, one of whom I lost touch with back in 1992, and it seems a great way to keep in touch with people I’ve met overseas.  So that aspect I am really enjoying.    And now it’s been a few months, I’ve got a bunch of friends (that’d be a generic Canadian ‘bunch’, and the most apt collective noun I could come up with for now) and I’m keeping in touch with loads of people that I used to work with, or travelled with or went to school with – all good!

Except that I kept getting spammed with increasing regularity with heaps of emails encouraging me to….

“Add Hotness now!  Answer my friend’s questions now!  Throw  a sheep back at my friend now!  Calculate my purity score now!  Send Horoscope invitations now!  Accept my friend’s likeness invitation now!   Challenge your movie knowledge now!  Check your Funwall now!  Add a growing gift now!”

And gazillion other strange little applications.  Most of which you add… have a looksee… some are fun… waste a bit of time…. some are not so fun…. promptly delete  🙂   It’s all good… and it’s been even better since I figured out how to turn off all the spamming emails  🙂

So the verdict from here is :  I likes the Facebook.  Maybe this is due to the satisfaction one derives from being able to totally perpetrate a mass defenestration on a couple dozen of your mates… which is something you don’t get to do everyday…. absolutely worth putting up with a bit of spam!   😀

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Isn’t it amazing how we can look at our friends, and see them so totally differently to how they perceive themselves.  Often I like to think they’re all deluded and I know better!  🙂 (just kidding)   It’s particularly odd how we like to project ‘happiness’ onto our friends, when it’s impossible to know if someone else is happy – hard enough to know if we’re happy within ourselves I think.  I think it is a fairly safe assumption that hardly any of us go wandering through our lives feeling, being or knowing we are ‘happy’.  For the most part, I don’t.   I sometimes catch myself in certain moments and fleetingly realise that I’m happy.  It’s usually little things, things that are easily overlooked or forgotten –

….. in the middle of laughing hysterically over something absurd,
….. standing out in a summer thunderstorm, rain drops falling on my face
….. the sun on my back on a cold morning with a hot cup of tea
….. lazily stretching out my back after sex 🙂
….. trying to keep up with half a dozen IM chats at once with friends
….. looking into the smiling eyes of someone you love
….. enjoying a quiet solitary moment with a glass of port

Little things like that… and occasionally I catch myself being calm, and acknowledge for that tiny little fleeting moment I’m happy – or at least for that second, I am able to over look the stresses and disappointments in my life.  But they’re quick little fuckers – blink and you miss them.  Seems as soon as the awareness of momentary happiness cross your consciousness… it’s gone.  I find it perplexing that my  worries or concerns can dominate my waking thoughts for hours, days and even weeks on end – but the things that make me feel happy manage only to surface momentarily.

Mostly I don’t think of myself as an excessively happy person.  I don’t wander around smiling a lot, I don’t have a very generous sense of humour, I’m very demanding (on myself most of all), and have a tendency to ‘worry’ at things… everything.