Facebook Friends - How many is too many?

Having many Facebook friends is widely regarded to be preferable to having few Facebook friends. This is incorrect, and I will endeavor to explain why.

First, allow me to clear up a common misconception. I am not a misanthrope. In real life, I enjoy having many friends and meeting new people. I am even amenable to small talk with strangers I will never see or hear from again in all likelihood. People are wonderful.

However, Facebook friends are not people. They are content providers, and Facebook is the content portal. Just like you would not add every available module to My Yahoo or iGoogle, you should not accept every friend request that is sent to you.

There are a few important questions that should be asked before accepting a friend request.

1) Do I know this person? Or, based on their profile picture, would I like to?
2) Do I want to know what this person is up to on a regular basis?
3) Is this person likely to post interesting content, such as pictures of me?
4) Does accepting this request obligate me to accept requests from other people (The High School Conundrum)?
5) Will my other friends be impressed that I know this person?

Even after you have chosen to accept a friend request, your work may not be done. It may turn out that someone who otherwise seemed like a normal, stable person is the type of Facebooker to update their status every 3 seconds or post pictures of their cat wearing antlers. As painful as it may be, your only option is to defriend this person. Your best bet is to wait until their status clearly shows them distracted, such as "OMG the Bahamas are AWSUM!", which will reduce the likelihood they will notice the change in their Friend count.

You may be asking yourself, "what's the harm in just ignoring their updates?" Well, dear reader, the problem is the opportunity cost. Their is a limited amount of real estate on your Facebook updates page, and I am quite sure you have a limited amount of time to read. Heaven forbid you should miss a hilarious picture of yourself in your best 80's garb because some so-called friend has decided to post the same Youtube video you've seen 100 times.

Now, Facebook does have many options for limiting profile access, changing update frequency for certain people, etc... but this is an outrageous imposition on your time and should be avoided at all costs. The only people to go to these great lenghts for are your mother (For God's sake, she spent 18 hours in labor and you're not going to take two seconds to click "see less from this person"? What kind of a monster are you?"), mentally unstable people, or anyone who might be both.

In Review: Cinnamon Toast Crunch, the best cereal ever

It is widely regarded that Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal is the best cereal ever.

Each piece of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal is handcrafted painstakingly by not one, not two, but THREE tiny pastry chefs. Head Chef, Wendell, with well over 20 years experience, oversees the cereal production quality control. His assistants specialize in using spoons and juggling spice shakers, their skills combining artfully to create "taste you can see."

Unlike the nefarious elf-chefs of rivaling Rice Krispies cereal, the Cinnamon Toast Crunch trio does not require the use of magic or the dark arts to aid in cereal production. Additionally, Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal can be eaten in situations when "crackle pop" distractions are discouraged. For this reason, CTC is the number one choice of cereals to be eaten at movie theatres, doctors offices, and Buddhist monasteries.

While one could argue in favor of the famed 'Rice Krispies Treat,' I posit that CTC can stand alone, content and divine without the addition of marshmallow fluff. Truly, CTC is more than just a cereal. Crumbled, it is a lovely addition to vanilla ice cream, but can also be used as an exfoliating facial scrub. Its superior milk by-product is delicious alone or used in recipes.

Many health benefits have been linked to Cinnamon Toast Crunch such as increased levels of Sweet Dreams and Joyfulness, and a 97% reduction in the occurrence of shark attacks. Studies have shown a direct correlation between CTC and stable marriages.*



*citation verification required

Naps (counterpoint)

Many experts agree that Ouslandish-E is the foremost authority on naps, and would prefer to wait for her to address this subject before hearing any comments from my peanut-gallery self. However, I'm about as patient as I am likely to hop into the flatbed of David Sedaris' boil-and-barfmobile, so we'll just move on to my review of naps. Which at least has controversy on its side.

Because, gentle readers? I hate naps.

It's unnatural, I know! In many theories, on many papers, I love naps. Often I find myself thinking, Gosh, how great would a nap be right now, and maybe a juice box? And then MACARONI PICTURES!!! And naps are more than childlike whimsy and they're more than respite from whatever it is that's driven you to read or write blogs like this. Overall, naps are representative of freedom, of control over one's own actions. The concept of naps are beautiful, because we live in a tyrannical world.

I'm just saying that the idea of naps is too beautiful for the nap itself to measure up. Do you know what happens when I take a nap in the middle of the day? I half-wake up in the claws of some meaningless dream, sweaty, with prickles in my skin and hate in my throat. It's really more like waking down. Down into some fuzzy sub-state, with one's body tied up and pushed down a well but still simultaneously wandering around the kitchen or outdoors (places where life is served but sadly not rebirth). And I linger there for the rest of the day, unable to shake it until I finally fall asleep again, which - sleep is a lot more difficult a destination when you're navigating from the bottom of a well rather than from the usual port of sleepy-but-awake.

Now, I used to be worse and it used to be all the time. So I'm willing to admit that some of my anti-nap bias may be personal in nature. But I have other points up my sleeve.

• No one will ever convince me that dreaming is as good as the real thing. Sure, better or stranger or more exciting things happen in dreams. I'm not saying we should get rid of dreams. But if I had to do with only one or the other, I'd rather not miss what happens on this linear side, for the same reason that I eventually get sick of video games and romance novels and . And I'd give up nap-dreams happily before I gave up anything else. They are always weird and somehow half-wakeful.


• I don't care how tired The Man makes me, I will not dignify those tactics with little snips of my consciousness.


• There's a lot to be said for staying awake. If you go to sleep you might miss something vital. Or other people might miss your vitality. It is widely regarded that kids often fight against naps for just this reason (chemistry aside) - they're always ready for something awesome to happen.


• Man, I don't always feel down even with just going to sleep at night like a normal person. This sort of has to do with the previous point, sort of not. There's something about expectations that flourishes the longer you stay up. Like, when you say you're going to stay up all night, you don't really mean that you're going to stay awake until it's daytime again. When you stay awake that long, you're not hoping for dawn. You're hoping for something new. You're hoping that if you keep your eyes open, you won't have to go through the door between a night and the next day like it will just keep getting later... and later... and then who knows. This is a great reason to stay awake through naps. Staying awake through naps is the beginning of this exploration. Staying up all day is the beginning of exploring the other side of night.

So. It's not that naps are unequivically evil or nothin'. For some people they may even be necessary, like how I have low iron and therefore think chicken livers are top drawer! It's just, be careful. Sleep is just as impossible as wakefulness, and works against your evolution.

David Sedaris (Vampire)

Many experts agree that the jerk David Sedaris is some kind of notable writer with worth and contribution and cleverness. But he makes me sad, gentle reader, because I also have been a gentle reader and his work is representative of the ugly ungentling the published world is trying to sell us as the new style. Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of bitterness and of humor amidst squalor and all that but seriously David Sedaris, we should fight someday in my Fight Club Ladies Auxiliary that I am not talking about.

I have a similar antipathy for Six Feet Under. I don't care how prettily it is directed or how cleverly it's written (which honestly? really? is clever the word we're using?) or what the scene means, it is just shy of nauseating for me to watch people sit around being jerks for whatever reason. And Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors memoir! What a jerk! I mean, this is embarrassing, the level of assiness that has to go into feeding the exrement of one's life to people. There's nothing in these stories to nourish or inspire or even amuse, really, beyond that kind of horrified amusement you get when people make dead baby jokes (though this would maybe be more along the lines of people making dead baby jokes about their own dead babies), which of course isn't even really amusement, just shock-laughter.

That kind of laughter isn't a genuine measure of appreciation so much as it's a defense mechanism. And defense against what? Against the total absence of goodness. The talent or art or fun or quality that comes from stories/shows/jokes like these is never good. Things that seem good are really just awfulness twisted into a surprising shape. It's absence. I think we've had enough absence. I think it's gross, that people should stop trying to tell me that deliberate ugliness is the same thing as awesomeness. I don't want to see cripples in gruesome fights with each other. I think we are past that and I think that in this time of all times that kind of baloney passing as potable is really really bad for the world. I was born far away from the colosseums, and this is not entertainment.

Per the terms of my man Augustine, the absence of good is evil. I for one have had enough of the Devil. Now I'm not saying we should burn David Sedaris' books any more than we should pretend that the Devil won't pee in the pool, nor am I saying that all our books should be all Whos and no Grinches, or that there shouldn't be stories where the bad guy wins or where life is dark and cruel. I'm just saying David Sedaris writes books are variations on the theme of an ugly nothing, and his books were designed to scoop us out like melons. And I do not need that business on my morning commute, so, you know...

Get thee behind me, Sedaris.

Edit: After reflection and minus the gut-reaction haze, I've decided that I might have been overly vehement. Sedaris' endgame is a touching and tender theme. I just choke on the gross every single time, way too much to enjoy things. And there's an insidiousness to that, too - like, does one start to wonder if this is what tenderness is about? That all the value in life comes down to the unspoken or the subtextual or the brief in a series of foulnesses? It's a backwards sort of definition to me, and I refuse to find it attractive. I can see, though, that there could be an appeal. If your life is already filled with jerks. Also, I have to admit that I have never ever in my life been into stories of survival against all odds. Because while the story is thematically about survival, it is actually about the odds, which are oppressive. (Like, I've never gotten anything but redundant misery from a book about immigrant Holocaust survivors, though that's partly because I find they blur out and undermine the individuals involved even as they attempt to do the opposite, but that's a subject for later wide review.)

Millenials (Cavaliers)

Many stuffy experts agree that our generation is some cross between useless, pointless, indolent, and silly. But sometimes I wonder, kids. Sometimes I think we are just way too cool for school. That there's more to the passion for style and the chic, ironic bitterness than even we give ourselves credit for. That we have the same virtues of exploration and ardor and even moral fortitude than any beat poet/hippy/grandpa, and that we have the added bonus of having re-established all these things on a crazy-ass global and ethical stage. That we recognize the past more than others, we see that the routes are totally established, we're down with that, we are cavaliers and troubadours, we can awesome up a chilly time our own selves on the thin veil of a premise that we're gonna beat up some roundheads or love from afar, sure. With our feathers and our sexiness.

Somewhere deep down we're pretty sure the world will surrender as soon as it sees how good we look. I think all in all we're a very cheerful bunch, which is a lot braver than any doomsdaysayer or dystopian imagined we could be. Probably even braver than the utopians figured on.

I keep reading about how we take our jobs for granted, how our work ethic is low. But a good article that says that will also talk about how trustful and socially engaged we are in the workplace, how accepting and dependent. It's a big bad time to be married to, sure, they knew that would be the case. What was expected, I don't know. But I think it's awfully nice of us not to be hateful or even really spiteful with all this malaise running through our veins. I think we turned out very gentle and humble, as generations go.

Of course we're not a majorly active one. Barring the sudden influx of Obama's Change We May Just Believe In, we haven't been trying to change anything on a massive scale - change is happening fast enough without us. Besides, we know all about bunches of kids who thought they were right and we're just a little too tasteful for retro with that degree of kitsch, despite our sense of nostalgia (however revisionist).

Not that we think it's pointless, but we've seen enough half-baked revolutions to last a long time. If it's the truth, we hope to know it when we see it. We're hypercritical, but not spiteful. Not angry. Just kinda smiling, maybe with a little glint in our eyes, maybe leaning forward to the sexy Marxist and whispering, "Baby, you can half-bake my revolution any day."

Kind of academic, we're kind of nerds I guess, but into each fin-de-siecle a little langorous nerdery must fall. Meanwhile, we'll keep up the stylishness, making the point that we take our image more seriously than whatever fake old war the creepy old princes have going on. They made the roads we're walking on, but by God we're the ones doing the walking and we will walk so crazy awesomely it hurts. We know, somehow, the better reason for being.

Our whole job in the world, as the internet (really!) is teaching us, is to make it more beautiful. Sexier. Smoother and sweeter and easier. Our job is to make it blush with how excellent and hot we are. We're writing letters to our bitches back home that say maybe, baby, you should loosen up already, even though that rigid frigid thing you got going is totally hot, because you're so sexy when your cheeks get rosy and warm. We're riding around with feathers in our hair. We have faith in the victory of style, at least that it'll carry us over for a ways into the troubles.
Not to say live for today, because that's soooo lame. But to react to today, with aplomb that will be appreciated not just by tomorrow and yesterday, but also by today. Just to be very very cool.

In Review: Spontaneous Human Combustion, the best way to die.

It is widely regarded that the best way to “go out” is with a bang. It is absolutely correct to assume this colloquial metaphor is literal.

To those readers who may find the prospect of dying in a huge ball of fire… unpleasant, I counter that it is, in fact, a painless and truly awesome departure.

Background Information
Spontaneous human combustion (SHC) is the alleged incineration of a person's body without a readily apparent, identifiable external source of ignition.

What Remains After a Spontaneous Human Combustion Event:

• The body is normally more severely burned than one that has been caught in a natural fire, suggesting extremely high burning temperatures.
  
  
• The burns are not distributed evenly over the body; the extremities are usually untouched by fire, whereas the torso usually suffers severe burning (or complete destruction with bones being reduced completely to ash). See figure 1.

figure 1.

• Only objects immediately associated with the body have burned; the fire never spreads away from the body. SHC victims have burnt up in bed without the sheets catching fire, clothing worn is often barely singed, and flammable materials only inches away remain untouched.

Painlessness
Temperatures of about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit are required to char a body as thoroughly as is seen in SHC victims (Even Crematoria, which usually operate in the neighborhood of 2,000 degrees, still leave bone fragments which must be ground up by hand). FACT. This, in addition to the fact that victims’ remains are usually found in the exact same spot as the origin of the fire, indicate that the victim—burned so hotly and so quickly—had no time to move from his repose. In other words, they don’t feel a thing. Or, at most, the excruciating, extreme pain was only felt for a few seconds before complete bodily obliteration.

Awesomeness
Awe, as defined by many important historical writings and www.dictionary.com, means: "To have an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like." Some things that are awesome include majestic landscapes, the vastness of space, philosophical ponderings of existence, and huge balls of fire.

Notoriety
SHC has been the topic of many really cool documentaries featured on A&E, the Discovery Channel, and probably a few episodes of The X-files. You can buy an old VHS copy of one such documentary online at http://www.amazon.com/Unexplained-Spontaneous-Human-Combustion/dp/B000006QCA. It only costs .95¢ so as to reach the largest audience possible, even during times of economic instability. Interestingly, customers who bought this item also bought the movie, Gattaca.

FACT.

Misconceptions About Finger Chewing

It is widely assumed that one could not, should not, tear the flesh from one's fingers without 1) it hurting like hell, 2) it causing one to bleed all over the place, or 3) forcing one to rethink one's definition of cannibalism. This assumption is both short-sighted and incorrect.

When sufficiently stressed, the flesh of the fingers (especially winter fingers, all dry and crackly anyway) takes on a leathery consistency, not unlike that of a two-day-old zombie, or one of those poor humans in Ghosts of Mars who has been possessed by a sadomasochistic vapor. In this state, the flesh immediately surrounding the nail loses all feeling, making it easy (and satisfying!) to tear, and almost completely devoid of blood.*

Once you chew, you need not fear of lusting for other flesh (either your own or others'). Chewing one's fingers is more a question of maintenance (like pruning a plant!) and obsession (yay!) than one of fuel consumption. Some might argue that your actions are Donner-ish, but they forget one important distinction -- you do it by choice! Most likely, you will never be given the choice of eating other people, so you shouldn't worry your pretty little head about it -- at least while it's still attached to your body.

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* Not to be confused with hangnails. Those suck.

January (The Prince that Lives Underground)

Many experts agree that January is a bitch of a month. It's cold and snowy (frigid), and there are all those resolutions that you still have the inclination to hold to (demanding), and there suddenly are barely any holidays* (doesn't put out). It's the kind of month that, were it a lady in actuality, you would warn your friends not to date. This reviewer, however, posits that January is a lovely bitch of a month, as in the kind of month your friend would go off and date anyway. And further, January isn't a jerk at heart or anything. Its behaviors, while bitchy at first glance, can be to the discerning eye, can be shall we say colorful. It's not so much that January has a softer side as it is that its unique position at the heart of winter affords it some luxury and delight.

Don't get me wrong. There are certain prerequisites to enjoying January. You really should have someone to curl up with, and you really have to enjoy curling up**. January, being, as mentioned earlier, frigid, will not bear the uninsulated heart with any particular grace. So yes, you have a certain amount of responsibility here, just as in any other month***. For instance, July requires summer dresses, swimming pools, and soular panels. April demands a certain amount of forbearance and firm control over one's seasonal vertigo. We'll not even start on what you need to survive November. But once you've attained the necessary safeguards, swaddled yourself in soft red blankets and warm wine and loving arms, you can safely look out on the sweetest month in winter. In fact, it might even be suggested (and in fact the suggestion is happening right this second) that January was created exclusively for bundling up in soft warm things, and for being snuggled, and for owning domestic lap-pets, and for having hot chocolate, and for starting fires in fireplaces, and for feeding soup to noisy kids. It was made for wandering outside for as long as it remains exhilirating and beautiful, then wandering back inside all red-cheeked and Hallmarky and not feeling goofy about it.

Because you still have your strength in January - not the bundle of energy that precedes the holidays, where you have to get out and do stuff before you do harm to yourself and others - but regular, lazy, well-fed strength. As in, it's not February yet and winter is still young enough that you don't feel like you might actually turn into a big miserable wet ice-rock if the cold goes on for one single more day. As in, you have some time to consider the quieter and more heart-shaped aspects of things. As in, if you've lived life right, you can spend a few minutes checking out your breath-clouds in the air or sucking on icicles or half-hoping, beyond the fear of the commute and even beyond love of the unscheduled day off, that it might snow enough for some serious snow-angels.

And there's the other half of having the time to really enjoy winter, which is that you don't have to think about all that other stuff, all that driving and eating and drinking and buying and giving and praising (denominationally or otherwise) and devouring your own tail etc., all on a tight schedule, with no wiggle (or angel) room. After the spin of December, we all frankly kind of need the holiday celibacy of January, before we burn out and miss everything in the blur all at once.

What it comes down to is that just looking at snow is one thing. You can do that any month of winter. But in January, it's new and fresh, and you aren't distracted by a bunch of crazy goings-on. You can love all that illogical stuff that you loved when you were a kid, if you feel like it, in the good bright quiet.

So maybe January isn't a bitch at all. Maybe it's more along the lines of the pretty and interesting librarian who looks great with her hair down.

To conclude, I present for your consideration the first section of Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "For C.W.B."

Let us live in a lull of the long winter winds
Where the shy, silver-antlered reindeer go
On dainty hoofs with their white rabbit friends
Amidst the delicate flowering snow.

All of our thoughts will be fairer than doves.
We will live upon wedding cake frosted with sleet.
We will build us a house from two red tablecloths,
And wear scarlet mittens on both hands and feet.


*The reviewer is aware of New Year's Day, MLK Jr. Day, and the Chinese New Year. However, New Year's Day is more a minor circumstantial part of December's super-exciting New Year's Eve - it's an afterthought. As for MLK Jr. Day, while it is indeed a totally honorable holiday, it's not a very party-ful one and a lot of people don't even get off work for whatever the January equivalent of a barbeque is, so it's kind of chilly after the giant month and a half of feasting we've all just done. Finally, the Chinese New Year doesn't always fall in January because it doesn't belong to January. There is also of course the reviewer's birthday, but that's a subject for later wide regard.

**If you do not enjoy curling up, you're probably a bot and won't understand the rest of this entry, or even the point of this blog at all. We recommend you shift your shiny ass over to http://www.wehearttoasters.com/ or whatever.

***The only exception to this rule of monthly girding of the loins is May, which has never asked for anything from anybody and whose only drawback is that by the end of it you've forgotten that other months exist.