I’m trying to write this column, but I keep stopping to check out my Facebook page. This is one of the many problems with Facebook. It can easily become an addiction. Luckily, I recently found out I’m not addicted when I went on vacation and didn’t crack my laptop once. I had my computer with me in case I wanted to check Facebook, but I didn’t. Hmmm, that sounds like an addiction, doesn’t it? Great. Now I’m in denial. And I have Facebook to blame.

If you aren’t on Facebook, then you must be a Yak herder in Outer Mongolia who happens to be in the one spot left on the planet that doesn’t have cell reception. Or you’re smart. Or technologically challenged. Or a combination of all three. While there are Facebook resisters out there, most people I know have succumbed and now understand the sinking-in-quicksand feeling when you’re getting sucked whole into the world of Facebook.

There are many valid reasons to be on the social networking site. All of these valid reasons are lies. Or at the very least, self-delusions. Most people go on Facebook with great intentions. They are going to promote their business. Then they see a Farmville post from a good friend who sent them a virtual cow as a gift. Five hours later, they look up at the clock and realize they forgot to pick up the kids from school. And they didn’t post anything about their hair salon. And then they feel stupid. Really stupid. This is when the Facebook Lies begin. “Mom, where were you?” “Sorry, honey, I was working on the computer and got lost in my new promotion.” You can’t tell anyone the truth. Or they’ll think you’re a moron. Even though they’re probably guilty of the exact same thing.

While Facebook has connected me with old friends and younger family members—many people I missed dearly—there are many downsides to the interactive message board other than the massive time sink. Like when you find out that your friends had a party and didn’t invite you. Not only didn’t they invite you, they took pictures and posted them. Or a friend posts photos of you from college wearing a risqué dominatrix costume from a Halloween party you’d rather forget. Or that guy who beat you up in high school friends you and since he is connected to all your other classmates you feel obligated to friend him even though you hate him and can’t believe it when the guy has the balls to post a Happy Birthday message on your wall. Or you invite an old theater friend to be your Facebook Friend and he declines your request. Then you watch in real time as the jerk friends every other one of your theater buddies but you. Not that any of the above instances happened to me. By the way, I don’t like you either, Jeff.

Other perils of Facebook include: Faced-Book, when you post something humiliating after drinking too much. Two-Faced-Book, when your friend cancels a date with you and then posts about what a great time they had with someone else that same night. Red-Faced-Book, when you meant to send a private message regarding something sensitive to one friend and accidentally sent it to everyone. Face-Off-Book, when your right-wing nutjob friends and your left-wing nutjob friends hijack one of your innocuous posts about the government and turn it into a verbal WWF match.

Another Dark Side to Facebook—aside from its creepy practice of vacuuming all your personal information and selling it to faceless corporations who want to exploit you—is the continual changes to its interface. Nearly every time I visit the site, there is some new feature that confuses me. This week Facebook announced that they will be making giant, fundamental changes to their site, changes that “should only take users two months to adapt”. Yes, two months. The interface will supposedly become an ever-changing “scrapbook”. Where everywhere the users go and everything we do and post and read and eat and listen to will be broadcast to all our friends in real time. I don’t know about you but that idea FRIGHTENS me.

At the press conference, a perky, pre-pubescent Facebook developer reported that nowadays everyone is used to living transparent lives with no privacy. That we’ve all become very comfortable with everyone knowing what we’re doing at all times. I don’t know who their research team is, but they are INSANE. Janet Periat just checked in at Costco so this is a great time to burglarize her house. Janet Periat just bought four pounds of candy at Safeway, which proves she lied about being on a diet. Janet Periat just threw her computer across the room because she can’t figure out Facebook’s new changes.

How many people want their bosses to know that they are attending a ball game instead of lying in bed with the flu? How many people want everyone to know they just got a colonoscopy? Or that they attended a Barry Manilow concert? Okay, maybe the colonoscopy is fine, but no one could live down the Barry Manilow thing.

What my friends and I need is OldBook. Where the interface is simple, private, and stays static, like Google (not Google+ which is another bastion of confusion). A site we can learn to use in seconds. Where we can enjoy our friends’ cute cat pictures, see what they ate for lunch, and be jealous of their recent trip to Hawaii. And not be made to feel stupid because yet one more modern tool has become too complicated to use.

But here’s my biggest beef with Facebook: they’ve got us all complaining over a free service. So technically, we can’t whine. They’ve hooked us on their Internet crack and made us look like total ingrates at the same time. I hate them. And I’m never visiting their stupid site again—oh, look, my friend’s cat had kittens!

©2011, Janet Periat

I’m tired. And not just because I had Apocalyptic dreams all night. I’m tired because modern living is exhausting me.

We were not meant to live like this. We started in small tribes. Our main concern was the same as it is today. Survival. However, a hundred plus thousand years ago, survival meant getting enough food and shelter. That was it. We killed animals, we picked fruit, we argued with our relatives. When we got too old to kill things, we hung out around the camp, taking care of the children and telling the younger generations that they were doing everything wrong. The younger ones rolled their eyes, fed us and cared for us until we died. And that was it.

Ogg and Mrs. Ogg didn’t have to buy insurance for an exorbitant price only to find out when their hut got wiped out, the policy didn’t cover hut repair. Nor did the hut get red-tagged. After a fire, if he mistakenly took down the last wall of his hut, he could still rebuild, he didn’t have to worry about new zoning laws. Or eminent domain.

Ogg didn’t have to worry about sacrificing his entire wealth to buy a house, either. When huts didn’t work out, he and his wife just wandered around with the rest of the tribe until they found a suitable cave. And they didn’t have to pay property taxes on the cave, furnish it with granite countertops, a Jacuzzi and the latest high def TV and surround sound.

Ogg didn’t worry about 401K plans, about the stock market tanking. He didn’t work 80 hours a week so that his boss could buy himself a private island in the Pacific. He didn’t have to worry about registering his car, insuring it and making sure to get a smog check by a certain date. Ogg didn’t have to worry about filing his income tax forms or umbrella policies, lawsuits or jury duty.

Mrs. Ogg didn’t take care of the kids by shuttling them manically between Chinese language lessons, soccer practice and Scout meetings. She didn’t worry about trans fatty acids or if her kids would go to an Ivy League school. The only thing she worried about was feeding them and keeping them safe from large animals.

Mrs. Ogg also had a whole tribe helping her take care of her kids. Children in tribes were never alone. Because Mr. and Mrs. Ogg never had to work late at the office to afford the McMansion, the Beemer and the timeshare at the lake. Ogg and his wife and their friends and parents were all together all the time. They didn’t need cell phones, Facebook and text messages to keep in touch. They were all close enough to actually talk to face-to-face.

I don’t wonder why we’re all so unhappy. We are meant to live simple lives in tribes. We are meant to work in groups with everyone’s focus on the overall, rather than the individual—not in a corporation where Ogg the Boss is making 600 times more than Worker Ogg. We were meant to watch each other’s backs and help each other.

People are so disconnected from one another today, if we see someone get attacked in a city street, more often than not, we don’t come to the person’s aid. We walk by derelicts in the gutter and avert our eyes. He isn’t any relation to me. I don’t know him. Yet, he is our neighbor. We’re all neighbors. If you haven’t noticed, we’re the only planet around for freakin’ miles and miles.

Yet, today, it is rare that we even know our neighbors. We live apart, plugged into iPods, iPhones, Bluetooth headsets, Gameboys and laptops. We don’t say hi when we meet on the street. Pubs are dying, cities are spreading out. Suburban and city living promotes isolation. We’re all so alone, we think others don’t like us. We’re afraid of others. We huddle in small, narrow groups, afraid of the differences in the other groups.

None of this makes any sense. We all have the exact same goals. We all want the same things. To be loved and respected for who we are and what we do, to have purpose and to be validated for the energy we put out. We want good sex, good food, a nice warm place to sleep and some laughs. That’s it. Humans are simple creatures. So how did our world become this unwieldy matrix of laws and rules and conditions and requirements?

Because somewhere along the way, the Oggs did so well, their tribe got really big. Which put someone in the position of managing the group. Which led to an agrarian society. Once we transitioned to an agrarian society, the Oggs in charge quickly realized that they didn’t have to toil in the soil any longer, they could sit in the shade and “manage” the others. Since they weren’t actually doing anything, they became disconnected from their underlings. The money coming in was so good, they began keeping more and more for themselves. Then they hung out with other managers and got even further disconnected. They became their own little tribe within a tribe with a new pecking order. Which prompted the Manager Oggs to cut the fieldworkers benefits and increase their hours to get even more money to impress their managerial friends.

And that’s where we are today. Still. After umpteen thousand years. You’d think we’d have all caught on a bit sooner.

I’m sick of it. Yet, the only solutions I can come up with are self-employment and spending more time with my friends. I’m still stuck with the taxes, building codes and smog checks. I’m also stuck sharing this wonderful planet with a bunch of power-hungry, greedy banker Oggs who just took ALL our money for themselves and left us with nothing. And with all those military Oggs who want to bomb everyone and everything to “make us safer”.

Which makes me sorely tempted to leave modern society and go cave-hunting. Well, with some differences from Ogg’s cave. I mean, I need my computer. So I’ll need a landline to the cave or a satellite dish outside. Caves are kinda drafty by nature, so I’ll have to build an enclosure inside with insulation. Might as well plumb it. And a fridge and a stove would come in handy. Maybe I can find a cave within walking distance of a city. Close enough for pizza delivery would be good, but not essential.

If you pass a woman on the street wearing animal skins carrying a pizza and heading out of town, please wave and say hi. Maybe join me if we get along. Don’t be afraid. I’m just like you.

©2008, Janet Periat

My sister moved out of my house this week and my parents went into a retirement home. I cannot grasp the enormity of these events. All I know is that I’m bloody tired.

I took care of my parents for the past twenty years. In late May my sister arrived on my doorstep. “I have a brain tumor.” June 10 she endured eight hours of surgery. June 11 she had a stroke, rendering her unable to speak or move. When she left the hospital and arrived at my house on July 4, she could feed herself but couldn’t brush her teeth or walk. She is now dancing. Literally. Not only that, she is cooking for herself, cleaning her house and caring for her cats and yard. Her speech is lagging some, she has a long road in front of her, but in the end she will be healthy. She’s made a miraculous recovery.

For me, they were the shortest, most intense and worst months of my life to date. Hell one minute. Hope the next. A rollercoaster ride neither my sister nor I want to repeat.

In addition to that atom bomb of health drama, my parents finally realized that being blind and confused without the ability to drive while living out in the middle of nowhere was putting a bit of a damper on their lives. Especially given their best two helpers were out of commission. So they moved in a retirement home in Santa Cruz with their best friends.

Suddenly, all the people I was trying to keep alive are now doing fine without me. Which has left me with a few big questions. Where do I go from here? What are the lessons I learned?

Number One: Worrying Is Stupid. We all know this, but most of us still spend countless units of our personal energy fretting over stupid crap. What has twenty years of worrying about my parents done for me? Earned me some gray hairs and many sleepless nights. Did it help take care of them? Did it help take care of me? No and no. All it did was make me drink more than I should and give me a stomachache. So I’ve decided to fire the Worrier in my head… Or at least give it a good try.

Number Two: Vacations and Breaks From Routine Are Imperative To Good Mental Health. Even in the midst of crises. Three weeks after Judy arrived at my house from the hospital, I was completely crazy. Thankfully, I had a Romance Writer’s of America Conference in San Francisco. The day I packed and left was one of the most insane days at the house. My parents, sister-in-law, niece, sister and caregiver all were having lunch in my kitchen, Judy’s occupational therapist dropped by with her supervisor and I was running around trying to remember what the hell I needed to pack while people bombarded me with questions and demands. By the time I got in the car, I was genuinely concerned for my mental safety. I prayed the hotel didn’t have any issues with my reservation because I’d go nuclear (reservation was fine). After I got into my hotel room, I bought a nine-dollar beer from the mini-bar (probably the best nine bucks I ever spent). Ten minutes after that, surrounded by silence, I finally realized that I was alone. No one was asking me for anything. I started to relax. By the next morning, I felt myself center. I was finally me again. By the time I returned to the house, all the problems that seemed insurmountable were reduced to minor distractions. I had no idea how therapeutic a few days away would be. I was able to handle the rest of Judy’s stay with my head on straight.

Downtime is not a luxury, it is a necessity. And this applies to normal life, not just crises. Without rest and a break from the craziness of life, not only do you end up working too hard for too little results, most of your energy goes to mood control because you’re too tired to distance yourself from problems. Which brings me to Number Three, which is really a part of Two, but it was going on too long…

Number Three: Be Aware Of The Current Work Ethic. Distance yourself from the herd mentality and make sacrifices to get the downtime you need. Or the next downtime you get may be six feet underground. Our current culture is driving everyone into producing more than is humanly possible. Job burnout is at an all-time high. The falling dollar, recession, pressure from Wall Street to earn unreasonable and unsustainable profits is pushing business owners and their employees. For some reason it’s become a badge of honor to work eighty hours a week without vacations. People who get caught up in this dangerous game (including my sister—who was headed for a stroke even without the brain tumor) not only sacrifice their health, they sacrifice their relationships with others. If all your energy is going to your work, it’s not going to your friends and family. And these are the only people who care about you. If you get sick from overwork, is your boss or a customer of yours gonna come by the house and take care of you? No. Take care of yourself, friends and family first, then think about your work. If that’s not possible, get a new job or downsize your business. There are plenty of solutions out there if you have the courage to look.

I will leave you with this last piece of invaluable wisdom from a fortune cookie. The secret to happiness is to count your blessings while others add up their troubles.

There, now I feel better.

©2008, Janet Periat