Attention all my Facebook friends: I’m no longer tending my Lil’ Green Patch. It’s been fun and profitable (I saved 29 square feet of rain forest, which is about one tree) but I just can’t do Facebook like that anymore.
So please stop sending me fruits with faces and names like Yummy and Walter Melon, and vegetables with legs, and exotic plants with names that sound like rare sexual diseases. And for God’s sake, don’t send me any bamboo. One bamboo plant will take over my whole lil’ garden area and I could get kicked off of Facebook for single-handedly causing a rain forest holocaust that would melt the Arctic Circle.
In real life I couldn’t keep a hosta alive and it shows up on all the Five Plants You Can’t Kill lists. What was I thinking, getting involved in a Facebook gardening project? Gardening is one of the areas of being a human where I fail miserably.
I’ll tell you what I was thinking. I was new to Facebook and didn’t know there were thousands of little doo-dads like the Lil’ Green Patch that were much better suited for me. So I unwittingly jumped into Face-gardening, happily feeding rabbits, buying gloves and hoes, and weeding strangers’ gardens. I had some trouble with vermin. “You have a chipper chipmunk darting among the plants,” my Lil’ Green Patch said one day. Instead of buying seeds and feeding the little rodent, I bought a shovel to bash it with and my garden instantly got filled with weeds and my coleus plants died.
Then I started collecting Shrute Bucks and Stanley Nickels, which was just stupid. I expect more from fans of The Office. Honestly. Then someone bought me a fancy drink, challenged me to a Nascar race, started a Browns’ wave, gave me a Mom’s Day Out deep tissue massage and bubble bath, and gifted me some mystical magickal trinkets and before I knew it I was working part-time just trying not to piss off my Facebook friends.
Then I got all changey hopey and joined a slew of Obama groups, helped send African girls to school, bravely fought AIDS and cancer, and saved Darfur, newspapers and the show 24. It’s exhausting.
Facebook is addictive enough, without the cute stuff, the fun stuff and the noble causes. Running a Facebook page as a grumpy, sarcastic cynic is time consuming in itself.
I have to get clean and fast.
I’ve had some success at this. I was pretty proud of my cold-turkey self-rehab for Spider Solitaire. It was my biggest single accomplishment since getting my daughter to wear a skirt to the Mother’s Day Tea her last year of preschool. To get off the Spider, I had to put Band-Aids on all my fingertips, sabotage my own computer and go to daily Mass for a week. The combination of divine intervention and smearing Vaseline on my screen worked. I was completely off not only Spider, but also Freecell, Tetris, Wild Wild Words, and electronic Sudoku.
So starting today I’m off Facebook fun. I sent a pointy hat to Mike Means yesterday and that was it. No more magikal mystikal gifts, no more waves. I’m not poking anyone back, either. I’m not logging in the books I’ve read, I’m not going to share 25 things about myself, nor am I going to find out what movie star I’m most like or how many degrees I’m separated from Carmen Diaz.
Please don’t take this personally. I’ve just got to get some work done. I’m a freelance writer with no boss, no discipline and no self esteem, and I’m dying here. Dying. Please help me by joining my new Facebook group, Help Diane Get Off Facebook and Start Living a Meaningful Life.