Welcome to Yawn Country.
Maybe it’s for the best, because I keep wanting to spend less time on Facebook, but my newsfeed gets so f&cking boring during the holidays.
Not just the winter holidays, though those posts are especially snooze-making, what with all the “Did our tree!” posts. Something about the sight of holly and berries, which I have nothing against other than that I don’t think green and red look nice together, makes me instantly uninterested. Like, hyper-bored.
To me, the most boring posts happen during all the holiday seasons.
Year round. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and most of all August, when everyone rents the big houses on the shore. They’re the ones of a bunch of kids, some yours and then some I don’t know, with the caption, “COUSINS!”
On any holiday, I can cruise through my Facebook feed and find at least ten photos captioned with just that word. Cousins.
So what? Why is “cousins” such an exciting event to you?
Why don’t we label all the pictures with that kind of excitement?
“Co-workers!”
“Civil but not very close neighbors!”
“Friends!”
“F*ck buddies!”
“People who don’t know each other that well at someone’s party!”
Look, I love my cousins. All the ones I’ve eaten turkey, unwrapped presents, splashed in inflatable kiddie pools, and hunted for matzoh with.
And maybe this is me rebelling against my dad’s lifelong obsession with anyone connected by blood, spit, marriage, adoption, or sharing of borscht recipe. (Personally, I thought dating a married salsa instructor in the late 1990s was rebellion enough.)
I just don’t get why the idea of cousins is inherently more interesting than any other group of people.
You know what would make it compelling? If you captioned the cousins pictures in one of these ways:
“Bunch of good-looking people who better not ever be attracted to each other, or they’ll have to keep it a shameful secret, unless they live in a certain state that begins with the letter K!”
“Actual cousins who decided they must also become ‘pee-pee cousins,’ a choice they could’ve made on someone else’s brand new carpet, thank you very much.”
“3 of these kids are well behaved and 2 have never heard the word ‘no,’ because clearly siblings grow up with different parenting styles!”
“People who don’t yet know the term ‘passive aggressive’ but have started to realize that there’s something strange about the way their respective moms, who are sisters, address conflict!”
“Kids who may one day fight over a will if we don’t decide now who gets Grandma’s jewelry — the precious stones and gold, not the costume stuff, though I’d like to keep that, too, if nobody else is going to wear it. Especially since Grandma said it was all supposed to go to me — in fact she said it many times, though she didn’t think to put it in writing, probably because she thought a person’s spoken word was sacred, but apparently everything needs to be signed with an affidavit for it to hold any weight in this family!”
Now you.
What really bores you in your newsfeed?
Do you find the idea of cousins that interesting?
Would you like my dad to find you some new cousins? He will.
TELL ME IN THE COMMENTS.
I had to come back from today’s post to see if this post really sucked and I noticed that Jenny actually said your writing always makes her feel a little de-prepressed. A mistake? Maybe, but I keep thinking about what it might mean to be pre-pressed and then what it would be to be de-pre-pressed. If I was pre-pressed then I would appreciate being de-prepressed. Something to ponder.
You’re right! I’d say that pre-pression is anticipation of being depressed. It’s like, “aw man, I’m bummed out that I might get depressed tomorrow.” So yeah, deprepression is exactly what you’d want in that case. Thank you! I’m now depostpressed.
I was going to say “Welcome to my world.” But now I know I can say “Welcome to my fucking world.”
No more dilly-dallying around words and whether we really mean it. I just love that Laura can use dilly-dally and fuck in the same blogpost.
That’s it.
Love me.
PS: Small town Italy is virtually a mini-mafia of cousin-hood. There, I used the word mafia.
The cousin-hood there is so different, isn’t it? Where “cousin” could mean cousin, or it could mean neighbor, or it could mean someone whose parents took part in the same babysitting exchange. Like, if you know someone since birth, they’re your cousin.
But there IS no mafia, right?
What bores me? Not pictures of cousins but the actual cousins themselves. And they don’t actually bore me so much as piss me off. And it’s not really all of them, just one in particular, my cousin, Ronny. And why does he piss me off you ask? Thanks for letting me get this off my chest. Ronny is the cousin who shot me in the leg with his bb gun when I was about 10 for no better reason than that he enjoyed hearing me scream bloody murder (hmmm….that’s why he shot me, not why I was 10 though that might make an interesting story too).
Anyway, it’s 30 years later and I haven’t seen Ronny in the last two decades but there’s a big family reunion and we’re all adults now so maybe he’s changed or at least isn’t carrying an AK47. I see him over by the kiddie pool and walk over to greet him thinking…hell, I don’t know what I was thinking. I stick out my hand for a polite shake and he pulls his hand from behind his back, bearing a fully loaded super soaker. 30 seconds and an unloaded super soaker later and I remember why I hate cousins. One of them, anyway.
Now, THAT’S a great story!
Wow! You are related to a supreme douche! That’s the kind of “COUSINS” post I’d like to see in my feed. NOW we’re talking.
I love reading your writing, but it always leaves me feeling a little deprepressed. There, I said it. I feel better. And probably made you feel a little bad. Sorry.
Cousins are special because they’re family but you don’t see them all the time, so you don’t become as immune to how awesome they are as if you saw them all the time. They’re like friends, but more special because they’re family, and not only do you know the same people (family), you know the same people REALLY well, so it’s like automatically sharing inside jokes about everything.
So, Laura, what do you enjoy? What makes you happy? (Trying to make up for above criticism!)
*depressed. What happened to my autocorrect?!
I thibk u need a cute and caring boyfriend like me. Haha 🙂
It ALWAYS leaves you a little depressed? You must like being depressed if you keep reading it.
OK, I started to type a short list of what I love and what makes me happy, but then I realized that was a good blog post.
So the next one will be purely upbeat. How about that?
I’m flipping it on you: what do YOU love? What makes YOU happy?
Hmm…is you’re dad a psychologist??? (or is it psychiatrist?)
(Your blogs crack me up. So, I must get your sick humor.)
*your, dammit!
Thank you, Lane. I get the way you get the way I get the way you get my sick humor. Yep, my dad is a shrink. Psychotherapist.
Ooohhhh….psychotherapist. Even better!
lol I do keep reading it. Like I said I love your writing, it’s not that I don’t “get it” necessarily, and often I appreciate your tear downs of superficial stupid stuff, I just started noticing I started feeling a little down after reading. Like there was now a talking shrimp on my shoulder throughout the rest of the day 😉
I’m excited to read your post about things you love and what brings you joy. Good to have some sort of balance, eh!?
I love so many things. There is so much that brings me joy. I can see how you might need to make these subjects regular contributions to your blog, there’s no way to cover them all in one post. Plus they are constantly occurring, new wonderful things happening all the time. You know there are….
Right now, my elderly pug brings me so much joy. He just radiates love. And snuggles close to make sure you feel it.
Sometimes I go to ‘like’ a Cousins! photo just to show my kinfolk that I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth and that I still care about them even though I’ve missed virtually every family eat-together holiday since the late 1990s, but then I don’t because I think of the boredom I’ll be contributing to my friends’ newsfeeds with this little gem:
Karen Powell actually LIKED this boring Cousins! photo.YAWN.
It’s a virtual guilt fest. Just like the holidays should be!
So true! Sometimes when I click like on something boring, I forget that I’m now polluting someone else’s newsfeed with that boring thing.
How do we break the cycle?
Ok, so my newsfeed was so boring and irritating, that I got off of Facebook last June and have never looked back.
But…last night, I was having a conversation with my Daughter! and my Niece! (Did that make it more interesting?) about what this F&cking and F*ck business is.
Here’s my rant: I say, if you’re going to talk like a pirate, than commit to it. If you’re more Peter Pan than Captain Hook, then say, “fudge” or “shoot” or any other less offensive word. We’re reading it just like you wrote it, with all the necessary vowels and consonants, so why not just write it out?
I. Don’t. Fucking. Understand.
Xoxo
You know, I so fucking agree. And yet, sometimes, I don’t feel the “fuck” strongly enough to type it out. I feel like I save the true impact of the word by using @#@!&* when I only sort of mean it. And then when I’m really feeling it hard, I write the whole fucking word.
Aye matey!!
Almos everything is boring in my newsfeed. I would leave facebook if it weren’t for a few groups I’m in (including my own for my clients).
That’s how I felt today. And yet, I’m so addicted to it. It’s the worst – if I’m going to be addicted to something, it should at least…you know what? I’m bored just writing this answer. Maybe it’s not Facebook, maybe it’s me! Maybe I need to go jump out of a plane or something. (As if.)