After three months of trying I finally managed to get to work early this morning. On a Monday of all things! I got out of bed and didn’t immediately get back into it, braved a sad shower in a cold bathroom, and got to enjoy the quiet, dark early morning streets. I have two hours to structure as I see fit before the week officially begins and my responsibilities to others run everything else off the rails. And how am I using those two hours?

The moral of the story is: The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men gang aft agley. But sometimes on the day they don’t gang agley, you find yourself wondering why you thought it was such a good scheme to begin with.

I’d say be safe and I’d say be well and I’d say if there’s mess in your life just embrace it, but that would require me to at least tacitly acknowledge the fact that I think someone is reading this.

Now I’m not one to write a love letter on something as tedious and uninteresting as Facebook, but can we talk about Facebook for a minute? Perhaps you haven’t heard of it… it’s like Geocities but with more auto-growing cacti. And its “status” feature gets me down.

Being the original member of the “Petition to get Facebook to remove the ‘is’ from status” group (this is a lie) I was of course thrilled to discover recently (even though it was probably news in the 80s) that the ‘is’ (as in “Simon is something”) is now optional. But even without that sentence-mangler, my first instinct (and if this was a multiple choice test I’d have to trust that) is always to write something negative.

If I was a cultural anthropologist I might cast a wider net than just blaming the intrinsic characteristics of the status function. I might ask whether something about the Facebook experience brings me down, or if I am more likely to think of using Facebook to begin with when I am feeling spiritually bereft. Perhaps a status message killed my father once. But being exceedingly comfortable with confirmation bias, I choose instead to blame that damn button.

The moral of the story is: do not consult me if you have observations for which you’d like to accurately identify causal factors. Also, if you don’t have anything nice to say, Facebook.