Fun With Facebook

I started visiting Facebook frequently earlier this year because social media moved from a back burner to a front one in my job, and I needed to understand the communication options it offered.

Like others, I reconnected with school friends and family members. I knew better than to try to friend my 18-year-old nephew, even though I'm dying to see what he puts on his page. (Or not...yeah, probably not.)

I even suffered for awhile from Facebook envy - you know, where everyone else's life looks so much better than your own that you want to either jump off a bridge or start staging pictures of yourself in gorgeous locations, surrounded by people who look like they adore you and find you absolutely hilarious (and who, by the way, are not nearly as attractive as you are).

But I'm over that, and now I revel in the unintended humor and the inadvertent hiccups from people's posts. Like the dad with his 8-year-old daughter sitting on his lap who titled the photo "Date Night." Or my colleague's young son who didn't know the full meaning of his observation when he wrote, "Facebook is like jail, you sit around and waste time, write on walls, and get poked by people you don't know." Or the guy who congratulated a female pal on the new fellow in her life after seeing she'd posted a different profile picture, and she said, "What? That's my friend Emily!" (Note to Emily: I might have made the same mistake. Except that the necklace and earrings tipped me off.)

And don't even get me started on the uproar that occurred when a few fastballs were thrown at us with the "new Facebook," and oh, the torture: we all had to LEARN something else about how to post on a FREE service. If we could have harnessed that indignation and energy, we could have changed the world. In a week. 

Still, it's good to know that this platform is there to immortalize pictures of our drinks and appetizers; count the days down to our vacations; increase the audience for YouTube videos of salsa-dancing dogs; and help us publicly humiliate ourselves, because lord knows we weren't doing a good enough job on our own. Ah, Facebook. Can't live with ya, can't kill ya.

She's So Vein

Now showing: Shawshank Redemption

On many a weekend morning at 7:00 a.m., I head out to Parklawn Drive in Rockville for a film fix.

If you're a treasured friend or close acquaintance of mine, you likely have received one of my "go give blood!" e-mails over the years. I'm a big proponent of blood donation: it helps cancer, burn, sickle cell and other diseased patients, as well as accident victims and newborns; it doesn't take long; our bodies replenish quickly; and if you are someone with the best intentions toward volunteer work (who doesn't get to it as often as you'd like), it's a big check mark in the charitable outreach column.

I've been donating since I was 18, when my friends and I would go out for drinks afterward (precisely because the nurse told us not to). About a year ago, I was asked to switch from whole blood donations to platelets. It's more of a time commitment - about three hours from intake to finish, instead of the hour or so it takes to give whole blood. And you can give platelets every two weeks, rather than two months. But the person who called me must have known my two soft spots:
1. Flattery: Apparently my blood has so many platelets that just one of my donations is like 2.5 or 3 of another person's. So of course I must share my riches with the universe, right?
2. I get to watch a MOVIE!: Turns out my Red Cross visit isn't much different from the kid who goes to Cartoon Cuts and doesn't squirm under the scissors because he can have a dose of Tom and Jerry. Put a good movie on, and I wouldn't notice if you drained me dry. Until, of course, the movie's over.

There are some other benefits, too - the Red Cross staff I see on my platelet mornings are some of the nicest people I know, and I can call for blankets and drinks of water and to have my shoes removed and my head scratched and my headphones adjusted in a way that doesn't work for me at home (maybe because both of my arms aren't hooked up to IV lines there).

But at the root of it all - no kidding around - I love knowing that over the years, no matter how flawed I may be as a human being, something of mine that was so simple to give may have helped out in such a remarkable way - perhaps in a national emergency, or for a child battling leukemia. And in a world where we can find so many differences between us, I am grateful that our blood doesn't make those distinctions. It just heals. And that beats watching a movie any day.

©2011 A Bit of Brie/Anitabrie

Wherever you are in the world, please give blood as often as you can.

It's much harder on the people who need it than it is for us to give it.