A little over halfway through, I’m feeling pretty blah about this exercise. It’s a success in the sense that I haven’t been on any of the sites I used to spend time on for the past four days, but I can’t say I’ve gotten much extra work done in the meantime. The main goal, though, is not to get more done during this week, but to strengthen my self-discipline in the future. A worthwhile goal, that, but hard to measure.

Quitting social media for a week has left me feeling disconnected and out of the loop. I’m completely cut off from my internet friends and people-I-follow, and I miss the casual chit-chat with my real-life friends, even the ones I see regularly in person.

Facebook and Twitter, for me at least, are all about being brief, witty, and shallow, and instead I find myself here on my blog, writing long, boring sentences analyzing the meaning of social media in my life. Gross.

If I do something like this again, I’m going to make it more like “only check Facebook once a day for a week.” It’s not actually interacting with people online that’s a waste of time, it’s keeping the site open and flipping over to check on it every time a new post appears.

Anyway, here are some of the things I considered posting to Facebook or Twitter today:

This morning was the second in three that I awoke at six o’clock to the sound of Sam vomiting. Two mornings ago it was his heartworm medication—if Sammy could read, he would have known that that crouton-sized cube was CHEWABLE and saved himself a lot of discomfort.

This morning it was a chunk of something that looked like building material. I guess it surprised Sam as much as it did me, because he didn’t make it off the bed. In his attempt to barf on the floor, he ended up barfing down the side of the mattress and into the frame. SIX IN THE MORNING.

***

With all the loading, unloading, performing, loading, and unloading I did for Saturday’s show, I got my worst bruise of the night when I tried to sneak into bed at 1:30 and banged my knee.

***

On Sunday I pulled something in the instep of my foot, I think because the dojo floor was extra-slippery. It’s not bad—I can walk on it fine—but with practices the next three nights in a row and Hidalgo this weekend, I’m a little worried.

***

WHICH REMINDS ME. I’m actually glad I didn’t post the foot thing on Facebook because I bet it would have elicited one of my least-favorite things about the internet: unsolicited advice. I feel the same way Dooce does about this, and she’s a much better writer than I am, so go read one of her posts on the topic.

Basically, when I post about some problem I have, it’s usually for one of the following reasons: (1) I have something funny to say about it, (2) it’s a really dumb problem, and the fact that it exists is funny in and of itself, (3) I hope to inspire a feeling of shared humanity by sharing my misfortune, (4) I’m bored, or occasionally (5) I want sympathy.

What I do NOT want is unsolicited advice. I know how to ASK for advice, and if I don’t, it’s almost never an omission on my part. There’s probably an instance in which I would appreciate advice I hadn’t asked for, but nothing’s coming to mind right now. You’d have to know me really well, for one thing, but sometimes I even get annoyed when John gives me unsolicited advice, so that’s not enough by itself.

Here’s an example involving unsolicited offers of assistance, which are worse, in my opinion, than unsolicited advice. A few weeks ago I broke one of my favorite necklace chains. I posted this fact to Facebook, not in a funny way, just “hey, this mundane thing happened to me, and it’s kind of a bummer.” Within an hour I had responses from TWO people offering to bring their jewelry tools to practice that night to fix the chain for me.

This sounds like a nice thing, right? What’s wrong with people generously offering their tools and skills to help an acquaintance? What’s wrong is that I then had to post four or five additional comments explaining that no, actually it wasn’t the sort of chain that could be fixed in a few minutes with pliers, but thanks for the offer, and no, really REALLY stop making counteroffers because it was a cheap old chain that I can replace at Target for ten bucks. Finally I said I’d already thrown it away just to end the conversation.

Okay, so posting a few extra comments on Facebook isn’t SUCH an imposition, but arrrrrrrgh. DO NOT WANT. If I’d wanted help, I would have posted “I just broke my favorite necklace chain. Is anyone good at fixing broken jewelry?” But I didn’t.

John thinks it’s weird of me to be annoyed by people trying to help me or give me advice. Maybe it is. But if you say to someone, “I have a headache,” and that person asks you if you’ve tried taking an aspirin, don’t you want to punch them in the face?

It’s not that all the unsolicited advice I get is as obvious as that, though some of it is. It’s that I’m not posting about my life so that other people can tell me how to live it. I’m posting to entertain those people, and to connect with them. I love getting responses to stuff I post online, as long as it’s not unsolicited advice. That crap drives me bananas.

Sharing how you solved a similar problem that you had is a close call. I’m all for sharing, so in these cases it’s a balancing test. If the comment is more about the sharing than the advice, I appreciate it. If it’s more about the advice, I’m annoyed by it. If it’s a close call, I move on with my life and don’t spend an hour writing about the crucial distinction between advice and not-advice. Oh wait.

Tags: advice, annoying, facebook, John, Sam, self-discipline, social media, taiko, twitter, unsolicited advice

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