My grandmothers birthday was recently. She lives in another community as we are preparing for her to move to our house by the end of the year. She is the last member of my small family to move into our new home that we have been living for the last couple of years.
We were going to plan to celebrate over the weekend, but it got postponed. I remembered her birthday on that specific day, and I sent an actual birthday card, and obviously it arrived a few days later. I need to call her and check up on the status.
My grandmother is as analog as you get (she lives in such old social standards, like sending a card that is HANDWRITTEN of a thank you via post mail. She doesn’t like the ideal of Facebook (because she’s an extremely private and quiet individual, therefore she doesn’t like how people would post their entire lives on the internet. In some ways I don’t like that because my general ideal of excessive privacy leads to troubled and corrupted lifestyles – i.e. my own personal views of local government lead me to be somewhat opposite to her views.)
She never used a computer outside of work (only using a specific mission critical app in the last decade), and she again, as an old lady prefers phone calls and letters. Because she’s a “farmers girl”, she views the world as “little” and revolves what my former town being “small town” like 5,000 people small which wasn’t the same in over a half a century ago.
Well I am someone who tends to not focus on the past (thats the family curse of afraid of change) but I try to live in a semi reasonable, but progressive society. At some point people need to adapt and stop reliving like my town is still a small town where everyone knows everybody, etc.
Now that ends to a point, and when my nostalgia comes into play.
I often don’t celebrate my birthday (and its becoming just “another day” beginning this year) because it was generally forgotten. People would not remember, often they need some aid to help them, like using Facebook – that’s if someone publicly publishes their birthdate/day online. The “friends” I used to have were really not friends. These people never seemed to look beyond your default picture or album. I had my birthdate as my handle on my MySpace, YouTube and Twitter accounts, but no one seemed to ever visit them, or even question what 3 digit number meant, especially when I used to put strong synergy across all my profiles.
They never reciprocated, and never went the extra mile (because that was dirty work for these entitled jerks.) Now granted, I did send emails, and not cards via mail. But an email is now the social standard to the old fashioned “letter” but digital and in fact is more personable than opposed to text. If you use Microsoft’s Outlook like I do, email gets stored into a computer file and can be read on any modern email client, etc.
Text messaging, however is the lowest standard for communication. Why? Its because the text messages can easily be deleted, and one touch of a button and the message disappears for good. This isn’t good if you want to keep a breakup letter for eternity as opposed to a letter or an email. Its much easier to send a half-assed thoughtful message via SMS as opposed to taking 5 minutes out of your busy life to type up and send an email birthday wish, etc. (For the record, I was never a fan of online greeting cards.)
Now back to Facebook, often if a birthday occurs, it gets published on the frontpage, then one starts the wish, then it extends to everyone else when people start to notice that trend on their News Feed. I did a test in 2010, made my birthday private, then made it public later that day. Guess what happened? These alleged “friends” wished my a happy birthday after. How fucked up is that? These same people who didn’t care that I turned 21 ether, never offered to have a drink together or what, as these people were social alcoholics to begin with.
Facebook, and all these other iDemented devices are really dumbing down the “normal” population and the groups who were forced and mentally raped of social standards, and socialization protocols, and other CAN’T dos, are actually going to be the best and the brightest because we socialize like robots by doing protocols and ettiques, while the “normal” population have an open license to be a jerk.
I try to be the good guy, and yet I get punished.
