Every morning I open up my various social media channels.
That’s a lie, really.
They are still open from the night before. They are never, ever closed. My computer is slow and cantankerous and I have exactly no one to blame but myself and I’m not sorry about it. My friend Jen suffers from this same disease and showed me a plugin that allows you to have multiple rows of tabs open so there’s no need for left and right scrolling across the toolbar. It’s a thing of beauty. It’s also a thing of judgement at our house.
Him: Any guesses how many tabs you have open?
Me: 26?
Him: 60!
Me: Is that a lot?
Anyway, back to my social media channels.
There are so many shares.
I really like the shares, If I’m being honest. It’s like I don’t even need a reader anymore! Google reader, who misses you? Not this girl! All of the funny, sensational, listy, heartwarming, outrageous stuff out there on the internet? It’s all neatly showing up right in my Facebook feed and Tweetdeck columns. And these things get shared more and more and more and get pulled up to the top of my Facebook feed and so I’m reading it all. I know lots about knitting out of vaginas and the worst autocorrects and the best vines (why is everybody afraid of love?) and all of the hilarious ways you set your elves on shelves and fake airplane fights about eating dicks what side of my brain I use more than others and all of the cat photos that were ever taken.
And because I like them, I share them too. Videos of Benedict Cumberbatch reciting song lyrics, lip-sync dance offs with Joseph Gordon Levitt, English people filling out maps of the 50 states, things that only anxious people understand.
I see your shares.
And you see mine.
And it’s a thing of beauty.
Because we are all laughing and crying and smiling and awwwwing at the same time.
But there’s something missing.
Something that’s not getting shared, something that’s getting lost behind all of the viral shares.
The stories, the blog posts, the funny thing your kid did last night, the hilarious conversation you had with your grandmother when you tried to teach her how to check email, that time you had your first kiss, that piece you wrote about being a work at home mom, that time you tried on 126 pairs of skinny jeans before you decided that you are a bootcut girl for life, that sad person you saw sleeping atop of the grate downtown, the rage you have for traffic, the scavenger hunt you made for your son’s fifth birthday, that shoebox of bershon-filled photos that you found in your parents’ basement, the day you realized that you have become your mother, that time you danced like Elaine Benes at your company’s holiday party.
They are not viral. They are not top ten lists. They are not sponsored. They are not telling me what to do. They are not telling me what not to do.
But they are equally brilliant, if sometimes not more.
They are your words, your truth, your story.
I would love it if you could leave me a comment today and share something with me.
It could be something you wrote, something you read, something you love.
A blog post.
A photo.
A video of your kid dancing like no one’s watching.
A great story.
A funny tweet.
I’ll go first.
I really, really liked this post. It’s about working from home. It really resonated with me, since my kids seem to have amnesia every single day at 3:30 and I need to remind them in a daily moment not unlike one that might be seen in Groundhog Day that the thing I do at home in front of my computer? It’s called working.
Well, it’s not always working, I guess. Last night while I was at the Media Profile holiday party wearing a dress that was too small and drinking Jack Daniels with THE Jack Daniels (or, you know, a fake replica of him) and fighting with superhero costumes in the photobooth, my kids were at home baking brownie cupcakes in my kitchen. It was genius really, because it was both math homework AND science homework in one.
And I got to come home to brownies, which really makes it like Home Ec homework too, then.
And a house that didn’t burn down.
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