Kicking the Facebook habit

I can hardly believe I'm doing this, but now that I have begun, I can't believe it took so long to get to this point.

Pretty much I'm cutting Facebook out of my life at least until next year. That sounds more dramatic than it really is. That's only 2 months. Still, I don't think I've ever gone longer than a week without logging into Facebook, if even that. And I have had an account since the fall of 2004. That was 5 years ago!! Facebook has become as natural as breathing, except I have found myself wasting hours and hours on the thing, and unlike oxygen, it has less possitive effects on my system. It kind of makes me sick just thinking about it. Yes, I have really enjoyed keeping in touch with some people and maybe reconnecting with long, lost friends, but has it been worth it when I look at how much time and energy I've wasted on it doing stupid things or mindlessly crawling over every public inch of the site? I really don't know.

Regardless, I decided one night out of the blue that I was going to do this and now I'm really excited about it. I'm already dreaming up plans for redeeming the time that it has thus far has been sucking out of me. I think the saddest part of it right now is that I honestly can't imagine life without being addicted to a social-networking site. How did people "network socially" in the past without the internet? It seems like they were doing a pretty good job of it to me.

Oh, and I'm also not going to be going on Flickr for that time either. I recently started getting on a whole lot more and realized I could look at other people's cool pictures forever. But that won't get me anywhere. So, Flickr had to go, too.

What's left? Email is definitely still happening, there is no getting around that one. But that's fine because I don't have a habit of obsessively checking it every hour of the day. And, of course, my blog. Sometimes it's my one piece of sanity I think. I will probably end up writing here a little more than usual to calm my jarred nerves suffering from Facebook deprivation (as I'm doing now).

Wish me luck! :b