I am not a shy person. If you know me or have even met me once, you would know this to be so. Except in one situation: anything online.
I don't have an explanation. I haven't had any bad online experiences. But I'm just not outgoing electronically. I don't crave an expansive online presence. I don't post on forums ad nauseum with extended reasons why my opinion is right and everyone else is wrong. I don't tweet on Twitter multiple times each day about the nuances of my life. And I don't fill up people's Facebook timeline with my thoughts, ideas, or re-postings about things I find "cute", "important", or "horrifyingly unjust". I guess I just don't expect people to care about the details of what's going on to in my life.
I don't even seek out friends online. Long ago I spent lots of time in IRC (Internet Relay Chat, one of the predecessors to the instant messaging craze). I didn't speak online much then and when I did, it was to people I usually already knew. Today, I do have a Facebook page, but so far, I have only invited one person to be my friend and I was helping him set up his account at the time.
Do you know people who seem to measure their social self-worth by the number of friends they have on Facebook? I'm frequently shocked to see someone I know on Facebook with over a thousand friends. I don't want to share my life's activities with a thousand people. Sure, some people have a large Facebook presence for business purposes, but that doesn't apply to everyone. I now have just over eighty friends on Facebook. That seems like a lot to me.
Recently, I've gotten a slew of friend requests on Facebook due to a single connection at my child's school. That one person commented on a picture of me as a child and their friends, all related to the school and all people I knew, saw the comment and sent me a friend invite. I accepted their invitations and then I realized what a total Facebook bore I am as I haven't put up a single post since Halloween when I shared a picture of my daughter in her elephant costume. That silent online pressure was getting to me with these new friends. So I put up a cute picture of my daughter in a mound of bath bubbles.
I class myself as an Accepter. I don't invite people online to be friends. It's that shy thing again. There are friends of friends I see out there sometimes through comments and connections. I've even looked up several people I've known from my past with relatively uncommon names and I've found them. But I've never sent a friend invitation. And I'm not sure why. I just can't be one of those Requester types.
So I'll have to suffice in being outgoing in real life (IRL) and have a more boring existence here, online.
The Big Boy Update: McDonald's Fries. We drove by McDonald's yesterday and he said, "McDonald's Fries" instead of "chickenfries." He may well grow out of the name before the adults around him do of saying his cute alternate name for all things McDonald's, chicken nuggets and french fries.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: "Where's Papa?" Before the children got up, Papa came downstairs and was cutting up fruit. He asked if they were awake and I turned on the monitor to see if they were making noise. Very shortly after that we heard my daughter say, "Where's Papa?" So, Papa stopped cutting up the fruit to go and see her.
Fitness Update: I went to the fitness room today at the clubhouse that's just opened in our neighborhood. I had a fun time on the machines, but the most fun was the elliptical machine. I didn't like the motion of it, it seemed awkward. But then I pressed the Mix Three button (or something like that) and it started going through all sorts of neat exercises that were more fun than just running forward. You used your arms to push or pull. Sometimes you'd walk backwards. You might crouch down or stand up on your toes. I intended to try it for five minutes and before I knew it it was fifteen minutes later and the machine was still giving me new exercises to try. It was fun.
Someone Once Said: If you can't define a word, you don't know what it means.
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