Why I (for the most part) stopped using facebook

I love Karaoke. But as many know I am also a comedian by trade and when I do some sort of performance even if it's karaoke I have to put on a show. I can't just get up and sing Piano Man because everyone sings Piano Man. So I have a couple of choice hits that I will sing when I feel like doing Karaoke. Probably my favorite song to do straight just like the artist is Cameo's Word Up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZjAantupsA

That is the music video of it in case you don't know the song, it's pretty awesome. Also it has Levar Burton for some reason. But as I was saying I like to do performances, this all started when I discovered the words of Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive. I would read them in a fashion like William Shattner that would result in my sobbing on the floor at the end. After this I came to find many girl singers tended to have pretty awesome lyrics when sung by a man. The one which really hit the spot though was Natalie Imbruglia's Torn. I mean look at these lyrics:

I thought I saw a man brought to life
He was warm - he came around like
He was dignified
He showed me what it was to cry
Well you couldn't be that man I adored
You don't seem to know - don't seem to care
What your heart is for
No I don't know him anymore

There's nothin' where we used to lie
Conversation has run dry
That's what's going on
Nothing's fine

I'm torn
I'm all out of faith
This is how I feel
I'm cold and I am chained
Lying naked on the floor
Illusion never changed
Into something real
I'm cold and I am shamed and bound
And broken on the floor
And I can see the perfect sky is torn
You're a little late
I'm already torn

Now imagine this song being sung by a guy who looks like a football lineman and I'm not singing them, I'm yelling them, screaming the words to the world because I, the giant standing before you is torn. Yeah, it becomes quite an impressive spectacle. But the thing which really puts it into overdrive is this line:

I'm cold and I am chained
Lying naked on the floor

Obviously I can't get naked on the dance floor, but what I can do is lie on the floor and unbutton my shirt as I cry out the lyrics like a beached whale. It gets a lot of drunk people hootin' an' hollerin'.

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Let's change gears here for a moment. (Wow this is a long post and still has nothing to do with the title. At least not that is apparent.) I'm a husky fella, but over the past couple years I've really been working on it, not very successfully but I still have been going to the gym quite a bit and trying to diet. My cardio is actually really good right now. But what the gym really helped me with was taking my shirt off. The first year of gymming I could never take off my shirt even in the pool, I've always had somewhat of a shame about my body as many people do, but as I was in the gym pretty much every day at the same time I began to not really care anymore. I took off my shirt and now it's no problem. Flashforward to now and I don't give a shit, I can take off my shirt at any function if it comes to that. As a for instance this slip and slide 4th of July party:



Yeah, sexy man doing some curling.

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So where does this all bring us? Well one of the reasons why I stopped blogging as well as all the other internet stuff is over the past couple years I've had a number of significant lifestyle changes. What this means is for instance let's say I'm on facebook and I post a line previously seen in this post, "I don't give a shit." There would be a great many people on facebook who would be offended. I'm not saying it's a bad thing or whatnot, it's simply my life has changed in ways in which I know if I were to post about would burn bridges here and there and I don't really want to deal with that kind of stuff. I'm the type who can talk with someone about in person but little sentence facebook bullshit will tear my heart asunder. <--- Yeah! Asunder.

But what was the moment which made me decide facebook simply wasn't worth it? So I had just done my Karaoke version of Torn, everyone was laughing and cheering. I got high fives afterwards and man was I having a fun time. 20 minutes later I receive a text from my dad, "What on earth are you up to?"

"Just doing Karaoke with some friends," I reply.

"Well grandma called us up because she got on the internet and found a picture of you with your shirt off and she was very upset."

.....

Within minutes of doing something very fun and not at all harmful someone in the crowd takes a picture, uploads it to facebook, tags me, my grandma sees it and gets very upset. I get a couple messages from past friends telling me they are disappointed at my behavior, my friends on facebook drops about 8 people that day. All because I took of my shirt at a gathering with friends. So from that point on I thought, "Why am I even on facebook when within twenty minutes you can have a whole heap of drama?"

Of course whenever I share this story the first thing anyone says is, "You know you can just change your privacy settings." How much drama does everyone have on facebook and can it ever all be solved from just changing privacy settings? But more to the point do I really want my life to be so interconnected that everything I do and say is judged within seconds by a random smattering of peers from different points in my life?

I don't like people not liking me, but if it means hating myself I just gotta live with it and do what makes me happy.

For those who TLDR: in this post I get naked and listen to Cameo's Word Up.