…hair, which once again I’m going to have to lop off. I am the last chick to spend any time on a blog post (or any piece of writing at all) talking about her mop, but once again it’s aggravating me so much that I am tempted to grab my kitchen scissors and Gillette leg razor and show the world exactly how large and misshapen my skull really is.

I cut it; I hate it. I grow it; it hates me. There’s no winning.

Having said that, I took a week off from writing because everyone deserves a vacation, and since I don’t have the dough to take off somewhere far, far away from here (and the only suitable place right now would be Antarctica), I decided to step away from the laptop. I spent quite a bit of time writing in July, both paid and volunteer work, and while it definitely saved my sanity during a massive depressive sinkhole out of which I finally, successfully yanked myself, we all need to recalibrate and recharge.

What I also did was learn my lesson yet again, and stepped away from Facebook. Stupid, useless, dumb-ass Facebook, amirightaboutthat? I deleted my account in 2018 and spent a very happy six years not even thinking about it. Then I started this blog and began to focus quite a bit on building my online writing profile–no matter what I was assigned or what I volunteered to do–and realized I couldn’t avoid social media in order to promote my splendid self.

Instagram is a big fatso of a nothing. It should have been a lovely forum for displaying one’s photographic sensibility, like an updated version of the old Flickr site, except with your own commentary, options for musical accompaniment, and people with whom you can share your unique artistic captures of gorgeous, once-only moments in time. Well, that worked about as well as the promise of the internet being a tool with which we could all swap thoughtful information and intelligent ideas and join together as a global community…except the end result was more porn than any previous civilization could ever dream of.

This article sums up the entire bullshit debacle of Instagram, wherein vapid, self-aggrandizing, phony-baloney attention-seeking arrogance and self-absorption characterize the site. Besides, nobody wants links to this blog on Instagram. They want pics. And even if the relevant header pic (with my accompanying blog article link) is on there, nobody cares, because there’s no “clever” commentary included beneath it apart from that link. Nobody wants to click a link to read something while on Instagram!

A picture of my heavenly knockers in a cheap bid for readers would definitely get some clicks, but would be taken down immediately, since a beautiful pair of breasts is more offensive than a post showing a blown-up Palestinian toddler.

…so speaking of breasts, my post about sexy legs got removed from my Facebook feed. Why? Oh, nothing terribly clear, except a notification came from the half-wits working there saying something like “This was removed for misleading content.” The fuck does that mean? Misleading content? There’s a picture of sexy legs, the article was about sexy legs, and I also talked about–

Wait a minute. Did some Gen Zedder at the House of Zuck review my post, and suddenly take offense–which is about as normal to them as breathing, sitting, and crying about their bewildering PTSD–to my also talking about how fat their generation is getting? I have a feeling this might be it. I guess it was misleading, because I didn’t provide the whole picture, and thus I can see how it led them in the wrong direction. In outlining how lazy and out-of-shape that trembling hothouse flower of a generation is, I totally neglected to mention something critical, something that would not have led them astray from my whole point: I forgot to mention how ugly they are.

(Honestly, I can’t even believe how delicate these kids are. If you’re too fragile to live in a world where you can’t even read the words “commit suicide” online without going apoplectic–their preferred phrase of choice, one word of which is not even a word, is to “unalive yourself”–then perhaps you might want to pack it in and move to a mountaintop somewhere. However, seeing a Grizzly might cause them to believe that the bear is “height-shaming” them due to its immense size, and accuse the nearby mountain lions of flaunting their “strength privilege” due to the felines’ incredible stamina, and like that)

On top of the yoinking of that blog post, I also cannot post any outside articles I may have written (not that I necessarily want to, because it’s just stuff I do for extra cash and nothing I have too much interest in share), because Meta has blocked news-sharing in Canada on its platform thanks to not wanting to pay publishers. One might claim this is a good tactic against misinformation or disinformation sharing, but please tell me exactly how regular users of Facebook have the critical discernment to understand what is actually authentic journalism and objective, factual reporting of current events, particularly since no such thing is allowed anymore by the mainstream media; nor would the platform users want to engage in meaningful, thoughtful discourse with each other about the posted topic or article at hand.

They wouldn’t. Not because they’re dumb, but simply because nobody would care to do so. It’s not what they’re there for. In my short, few, painful months back on Facebook, it presented itself as nothing but a completely haphazard and unnavigable site with a news feed that made zero sense, was not in reverse-chronological order anymore, and which showed me some of my “friends” commenting on the pages of unknown people to whom they were connected, but I wasn’t–as if I somehow wanted to know about it, or read it. It’s a laughable disaster, worse than it ever was before I deleted my original account.

Apart from that grumbling digression, everyone there cares more about the same stuff they always did: things they think are funny, vacation pictures, observations about whatever, moving tributes to people they love, and cheerful hustles to keep their personal achievements relevant (guilty as charged!). It is more surface-level and polished and curated than I’ve ever known it to be. News? Nobody cares about that. And if it were reintroduced to the site, everyone would continue to not care.

So do I have to heave a sigh and roll my eyes to the heavens and actually dip a toe into the fangs-bared bog of bloodthirsty piranhas they call Twitter? Sorry, “X”? Xitter?! This is how much I pay attention. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. But promotion is promotion, and I know some people of very, very middling talent who know how to use social media to gain loads of attention and gain followers–no matter who they are–and shove their output into everyone’s faces as much as possible. And you know what? They do get attention, because everyone’s on social media. Scrollin’.

Scrollin’, scrollin’, scrollin’,

Though their thumbs are swollen,

“Keep those readers rollin’,” say I,

Through deathly heat-wave weather,

They’re all in it together,

Staring at their screens and locked inside,

All the things they’re missin’,

Like knowin’ how to listen

To logic, when it says it’s all a lie.

-Sung to the them of “Rawhide,” obviously

That’s it for me; a rant about social media that could have merited its own blog site altogether. But it ain’t worth it. And with that, hope your weekend was splendid, and I will be back shortly with something that will hopefully offend nearly everyone who reads it be a delightful reminiscence of a lost, wonderful time.

Love,

Nadya Vera.