Solution:

I will now respond to exceptionally stupid posts on Facebook with a cheery comment that said poster should enjoy a very happy birthday.

Because people who reduce complicated issues to a single sentence deserve to live in a more confusing world.

Why I'm on Facebook

The guy who I sat next to in Botany meetings years ago ewwww! dog hairs in the coca leaves!

My best friend when I was eight wants a fox squirrel.

C's roommate from college spent three days decapitating lab wasps and will probably have to do more of this in the future. Anyone know of a place that sells insect-sized guillotines?

R's college roommate All sex, all the time.

I just unfriended someone because they joined the Facebook group "why test on animals when we have pedofiles in prison."

I find the idea of unwilling human testing abhorrent, yes, and I believe that prisoners are already treated inhumanely. I have read several articles that indicate that there are many false convictions of child molesters, and other which indicate it's a horrible horrible pathology instead of a wicked choice. Clearly, she and I feel very differently about this issue.

But who joins a group with an obvious misspelling and no capital letter at the beginning? Who?

And I hate bunnies. Why not put Lysol in their tiny beady eyes?

Short Faced Bears.

Okay, this is just too awesome for words. It's an article about the Bay Area during the Pleistocene. There was a river to rival the Amazon! The continental shelf was exposed, resulting in a thirty mile band of coastal prairie west of Golden Gate Bridge! There were mammoths, cave lions, cheetahs, dire wolves, and giant ground sloths! There was a twelve foot tall bear than could sprint 40 mph!

If there were three huge rivers trisecting the Bay Area, the island effect would lead to speciation- populations would be divided, and you'd expect to see an unreasonably high number of endemics. And this is so! I've been fretting about the diversity of crazy rare plants in the Bay for a while.

The best part of the article is that it cribs heavily from a book on Paleobotany that is currently on my nightstand. I now have more reason to feel guilty about not reading it.

No, the best part is that the type specimen for short-faced bears is from Shasta Caverns- an entire skeleton! Oh my goodness, that is an awe-inspiring thing to contemplate.

I bumped into a friend of my parents in a field of poison oak behind a locked gate yesterday. He gave me a list of everything he'd found in the area, starting with a field stripped rifle (a 308, so nothing super scary) wrapped in several garbage bags, a couple of caves, a rare aster, a rare salamander, a feral pig skull, and a terrible allergy to Toxicodendron. Thus, I am inspired to find bear teeth. (I have previously stated that I maintain certain friendships primarily for entertainment value and exposure to truly insane schemes- remind me to do a post on R's first roommate- and I believe this man serves a similar purpose for my father. Except he's pleasant. And most of his schemes involve trail building and waterway restoration.)

Also, I keep bitching about poison oak in the abstract, fact-of-life fashion that occurs in the workplace, and people keep offering sympathy. At work, I'll say "I want to bite this skin and worry at the rash like a dog." and my coworkers respond "I'm so coated in tar I no longer do a spot check before peeing." On Facebook, I make a pleasant reference to Technu showers, and dudes start talking about how they once had oak balls whilst ladies try to sell me on pharmaceuticals.

I want to do a series on "Why I hate your Myers/Briggs personality type", but I think it may be unwise. Thoughts?

Family!

Yesterday my cousin* posted her disappointment with Obama's decision to skip the Polish president's funeral. (It's a trap! the want him to prove he can fly without a jet. You know who else can fly unaided? The Antichrist.) Today she posted extensive Leonard Cohen lyrics on a sadomasochistic relationship. (Possibly she does not realize.) Then she started talking about Sailor Moon and math being hard. I'm delighted.

*I have twenty-three cousins. Probably. I can't be bothered to think of awesome nicknames for each of them, so as far as you are concerned, dear readers, I have two cousins. One with a gender identity crisis, three different religions, anorexia, diabetes, Obamania and tea party delusions who lives in seven different states and occasionally France or Haiti. The other is Pete.

Ephemera

C's visiting. We're introverts, so our visit is currently sitting in different rooms, typing on separate computers. This is the worst part of the long distance relationship bit: we like each other very much and are sad because we don't spend more time together, but after ten hours together we desperately need to sit quietly.

I keyed three county records this week- I'm a little disturbed. There must be an error in my technique. Also, pleased.

I'm souring on Facebook. I have a friend from kindergarten on there. She is raucous. Her profile picture disturbs me. Reading about her life is either depressing or irritating. (It's not tragic that people can't fly to Europe. It's tragic when people die, not when our magic floating boxes don't work.) Also, she adores me and comments on most things I say. Unfriending would make me feel like a terrible person! So bad!

We bumped into people while we were out for a walk: they asked about the Chilean earthquake. C was talking about how some buildings that should have been fine were not fine, and that was vexing. Literally dozens of people were killed, he said. I started thinking about infrastructure.

All of his family lives pretty much like college students, even into their forties. I'm just beginning to understand that's because their infrastructure is so good. For instance, one of the major complaints about the last president was her messing with the bus schedules. For another, an 8.6 earthquake knocked out power for 36 hours, and they complained. A snowstorm took out a line somewhere and we were electricityless for twice that long and were still soldering on. (Oh no, one can cook Christmas dinner in the fireplace. Let's sit around and sing carols!) This is a culture where the framework for civilization is solid. And entirely government owned.

That sounds nice. Except for the looting.

Disparate Topics

I was blathering on Facebook that I get to go to a party! An actual party! A costume party! Mike said that the theoretical lizards I killed to make my costume probably deserved it, and I was going to explain how they did not, but then I realized I have a blog for nonsensical ramblings- Facebook is for obtuse koans.

So. I go to Pilates Wednesday mornings. This Wednesday, my mother woke me up and explained that we were going to Pilates. It wasn't until we were halfway to the next town over that I realized she was talking about a different Pilates class in a different place. The instructor did not deign to show up for said class, so we ran on the machines and then sat in the hot tub. I was piqued about our miscommunication- and about not getting to do my stretches- so I was trying to be exceptionally nice to my mother.

Thus I mentioned that I was going to a costume party Friday, and asked if we might have any aquatic space Viking costumes.

We didn't. (I know that you are surprised.) We did have a WHOLE DAY to find and make a costume for me and a costume for C. I was gonna oil my boots, do some laundry, maybe find a funny hat... But now I have a costume. She's very excited because she has some lizard print fabric from 1998 that she finally gets to use. We went to the used clothing store and picked through their Halloween boxes in the basement, we hit up the neighbors for skin friendly adhesives so I could attach gills and we are currently dying gardening gloves and leggings into more acceptable colors. I... I live in a world where my attempts at pleasant conversation lead to me crawling around in the rafters, looking for the flippers from the penguin costumes.

Because we own nine penguin costumes. NINE.

Now, if I'm an aquatic Viking, I will necessarily be hunting aquatic reptiles. I have decided that they are some form of marine iguanas- pleasant animals, wouldn't hurt a fly. And I am thus reminded of the afternoon Darwin spent throwing an iguana into the ocean.

He grabbed a likely reptile, walked to a point, and hucked it into the waves. It swam back to his feet. He threw it in again. It swam back. And so on throughout the afternoon. Little bit of sadism on the father of the evolutionary theory, yes? And further examples of an animal reacting to stress by provoking more stress.

All of this is because I don't have enough to do

I'm a full contact Facebook user. I have stupid Zynga flash games out the wazoo, I stare blankly at the photo albums of people I will never meet, and I keep track of all the causes my friends join.

So I guess sending someone who lived in the same building freshman year a bouquet of fake flowers or some imaginary cell phones is encouraged. (Hi, Mafia Wars friends! I need the Ace of Clubs!) Many people do the uneasy half laugh when they recall the long afternoon where they clicked through the photo album of their high school boyfriend's roommate's church group's river rafting trip. I like to think of it as research on the good social groups.

The problem is if someone- not even a close someone- joins a interesting cause, I will read that cause's Facebook page. And then any relevant Wikipedia articles. And then any recent news stories. Then I'll check the whole thing out on snopes. Two hours later, I'm immersed in old textbooks on water law and wading through the text on the congressional website. Also, I know where the honorable gentlewoman from Connecticut got her master's.

I take it back. That's a problem. That's my problem. But crossing the invisible social boundary by surprise rebuttals is not encouraged on Facebook. (Much like real life!) The poor people who are on record as opposing HR875 really just clicked "support" to get it out of their inbox. It's like my support for ShastaBoyz Productions- based entirely on peer pressure. They don't really want to debate their decisions with me. :(

This is the other side of my boundaries post. Heaven forbid you reach out to your social network in a time of trial, but I would love to argue with you about... well... Food safety. Labeling GMO. Grammar. Global Warming. Proper respect for humans. Sturgeon's Law as it applies to the Singularity.

So hey, I joined the gym. I think that will help with the spare time. A little.

Would anyone want to discuss the Food Safety and Modernization Act of 2009? I am chock full of information on the topic, and I want to justify my support for the bill. I'd also like to chat about my gut feeling that Monsanto is not quite evil enough to outlaw vegetable gardens. Oh, and that a woman with a master's in sociology from New England is probably not going to support outlawing farmer's markets. Just the merest inkling. A supposition.

Do y'all have anything for me to research? Anything productive?

Fickle Internet Identity.

So I'm reading the blog of one of my Facebook friends. We went to high school together, and right now we're both living with our parents and chewing pensively on the insides of our cheeks. Her blog is less with the blithe and more with the searching emotional truths, though. While she often posts links on her profile, I'm pretty sure I'm not the target audience. Some of that stuff is pretty personal.

I saw her in person yesterday, and I totally talked like my mom. (My mother is not exactly famous for monopolizing the conversation, but she will return from dinner parties full of people's reactions to my exploits and with no idea if the host's children are, you know, alive.) Partly, I was afraid of yelling "I READ YOUR BLOG AND I AM SORRY YOU ARE SAD." and part of me figured I already knew what was going on in her life. Why should I ask?

I have a similar problem every time I see Daniel's parents. He's doing a sneak visit home for Christmas (he lives in Germany) to surprise them. "Hello guys, I live with my parents now. Nothing remotely interesting is happening in my life, so I'm going to talk about cats for five minutes. Oh, I have to go now." They must think I'm very self absorbed (and dull) but as least I didn't blurt out "It's weird that Daniel's coming home for Christmas when you're Jewish."

So your marriage is falling apart and you're worried your child is autistic? Be sure to let that weird girl from grade school know.

So I hated the new Facebook, blah blah blah. I am coming to appreciate one feature that piqued me at first.

Look on the far right, below all the unaccepted gifts for Zynga games you aren't playing. It's the suggestion box! It suggests people for you to friend, and friends you haven't interacted with in a while. I thought this was further obsessive mapping of my social networks so I can be tracked if I ever go rogue*, what with the constant encouragement to form connections! interact! talk to old friends!

Anyways, chances are you didn't listen. You're such an iconoclast.

I've found it very useful for something else. If I start to type a status update that's maudlin or a bit on the oversharing side, I glance over to the right. There's the face of my first boyfriend, right above the face of a very pleasant coworker who I knew for over a year before I realized he was dating another coworker. Those dudes are going to be reading my update.

I type something about kitties instead.

Oh good Lord, I wish to heaven that the people who have me in their "reconnect with Jane!" box had the same habit. Good golly, it would be nice.

*We all know I'm swimming to Maui when I go rogue**, since Ryan and Amy are too grown up to use Facebook.

**Did I spell that right? I've been reading the Rouge Angles of Satin article on tvtropes, and it really messed with my homonym spelling. I used the wrong "there" and "its" this morning, and must now find some way to restore my honor***.

***I also read about the 47 Ronin. All I can do is shake my head and say "Oh, Japan."