The thing about Facebook

While unable to contribute to my blog for a while, and particularly since this coincided with a period in my life when I didn't really fancy writing a great deal, I sought refuge in the simpler and less creative world of Facebook.  This allowed regular updates and discourse with friends, many of whom are far afield, but often in a more censored "real life" sense than my blog permits.

But the thing about Facebook is, well, there are many things about Facebook, particularly in terms of privacy - users have to be careful to set their options carefully, or all their information could become available to everyone else (but why put all that information on the internet in the first place if you don't want others to see it?) - but the best thing about Facbook is the disposability of users' so-called friends.

• Add me as a friend


• I don't like you - click "ignore"


• I don't like you - click "delete as friend"

And that's it - somebody could be gone from your life in an instant and you wouldn't care.  Brilliant.  It's like the woolly monkey scenario*... and then you saw them... well, you just don't see them anymore.

During a turbulent two months in the summer I encountered the strangest of women, who declared me her soulmate within 36 hours of her becoming aware of my existence, weeks before we met.  She used Facebook to torture me.

• Day 1: "You're my soulmate, add me as a friend"


• Day 1 (a bit later on): "You are not emotionally mature enough for me, goodbye x"


• Day 1 (even later): "?"

• Day 2: "I love you baby"


• Day 2 (later): "You are friends with bullies, goodbye x"


• Day 2 (even later): "?"

Repeat days 1 & 2 for about six to eight weeks.

Anyway, over the course of six weeks or so, during which time we'd met on three occasions and spoken even less on the phone (her demands, not mine), she decided that I was her soulmate and her life partner, that I was a murderer because I wasn't a vegan, that all my friends were abusive bullies, that I had crippling low self-esteem, that I was Satan's representative on earth.  Try as I might, it's difficult to describe the insanity of that crazy, fucked up time, but what better way to illustrate than by telling it from the horse's mouth... a short (honestly) excerpt from a heated exchange that occurred while I was on holiday in Las Vegas....

Baby,

I hope you arrived at your holiday destination safely and that this email finds you safe and well.

I am neither safe nor well and due to you being thousands of miles away and having left without making any arrangement with me about how I can contact you while you are away if the need arises I am consequently left to deal with the shit your friends are causing me without any support from you whatseover.I'm guessing that your hotel has internet access so you could have at least arranged that we would email each other once a day and check each others emails once a day just incase anything cropped up where we required each other's support but you didn't so here I am without your support and having to deal with this...

...

Piggy: Are you there yet? Are you? Are you?
Has April rubbed her muff all over your chops yet?

Ruth: Piggy your blatant attempt to bait me is pathetically transparent and contemptably unsupportive of Sniffy.Grow up man! *yawns*

Then:

And their abuse of me and more importantly their abuse of our relationship itself just goes from bad to worse, the following quote from Tazzy being just one of many examples of that...

Tazzy commented on your wall post:

"You've only ever met Sniffy ONCE!
Was it YOU that said you were 'in a relationship' with Sniffy? I'm sorry but you don't start a relationship with ANYONE after meeting them ONCE!
I ONCE met Elton John... I don't go around saying I'm 'in a relationship' with him!
Glenn Close springs to mind!"

Bearing in mind that this was already kicking off while I was in transit and hadn't even made to Vegas... much more was to come...

Ruth sent you a message.

Subject: Judas

"Oi!Judas!Do you have you ANY idea how it feels for me to watch you engaging in banter with people who have, by their own admission, abused me?!DO YOU???!!!"

Nice! But still, I was 40,000 in the air, 8 hours behind, with no internet connection, so it was obvious that there was not a lot I could do about it.

And more, much, much more...

"I gave you a whole calendar month of my life and you gave me a whole calendar month of hurt and stress but no more.I am walking away from your arms and I am walking straight back into the arms of sweet sanity..."

"I would bet my life on it that those bullying bastards are feeling as smug as fuck that they were able to abuse and bully me AND still get to keep you as a friend.
Loyalty my fucking arse!"

"I would bet my life on it that those bullying bastards are feeling as smug as fuck that they were able to abuse and bully me AND still get to keep you as a friend.
Loyalty my fucking arse!"

"Oi!Judas!Do you have you ANY idea how it feels for me to watch you engaging in banter with people who have, by their own admission, abused me?!DO YOU???!!!"

"Or better still and oh SO apt, "There's A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends" by Morrissey!"

"Sniffy's current personal karaoke fav at the moment would have to be, "The Scientist" by Coldplay but hey baby you  neglected to take enough care to ensure that I was wearing my seat belt  because...you were too busy taking care of your other passengers so there's really no going back to the start which was actually one calendar month ago today, que sera sera!

"Sniffy's current personal karaoke fav at the moment would have to be, "The Scientist" by Coldplay but hey baby you neglected to take enough care to ensure that I was wearing my seat belt because...you were too busy taking care of your other passengers so there's really no going back to the start which was actually one calendar month ago today, que sera sera!

"Or better still and oh SO apt, "There's A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends" by Morrissey!"

"Sniffy's current personal karaoke fav at the moment would have to be, "The Scientist" by Coldplay but hey baby you neglected to take enough care to ensure that I was wearing my seat belt because...you were too busy taking care of your other passengers so there's really no going back to the start which was actually one calendar month ago today, que sera sera!

"I would bet my life on it that those bullying bastards are feeling as smug as fuck that they were able to abuse and bully me AND still get to keep you as a friend.
Loyalty my fucking arse!"

"One of my closest friends who I regarded as a beloved brother killed himself recently by hanging himself and nobody who knew and loved him, including me, had any clue that such a horrific thing was about to happen.He was 29 years young.I attended his funeral and watched his coffin being lowered into the ground only a week ago which was deeply disturbing for me because a few weeks before that he had visited me at my home and had been his usual vivacious self.I lost both of my parents to suicide so the way my friend died is even more painful because of that.
Add to all that the additional stress being caused by Piggy's cheap joke about another person performing oral sex with my life partner and Piggy and Tazzy's bullying attacks on me after I made it clear to John that I didn't appreciate aforementioned cheap joke, do the maths and you might be able to imagine where I am currently at..."

"I truely love Sniffy.What I feel for Sniffy is not infatuation or lust alone but authentic love but love alone, no matter how sincere and how deep, is not enough to sustain a relationship which needs other things beside love such as respect and loyalty to survive.

All of us always has room for personal growth and personal improvement is an on going, life long project for us all and therefore I do not excpect perfection in a partner.What I do expect from them however is that they not be detrimental to my emotional health and sadly Sniffy is currently in a headspace where the mistakes she makes are big enough to be detrimental to me, thus the reason I have withdrawn from her so many, many times during the past month.Each time I withdraw from her Sniffy has asked me to give her another chance, which I do, but the result of that has always led us back to square one where I feel the need to withdraw again to protect my emotional health from the negative impact her mistakes have on it..."

"LISA - One of my closest friends who I regarded as a beloved brother killed himself recently by hanging himself and nobody who knew and loved him, including me, had any clue that such a horrific thing was about to happen.He was 29 years young.I attended his funeral and watched his coffin being lowered into the ground only a week ago which was deeply disturbing for me because a few weeks before that he had visited me at my home and had been his usual vivacious self.I lost both of my parents to suicide so the way my friend died is even more painful because of that.

Add to all that the additional stress being caused by Piggy's cheap joke about another person performing oral sex with my life partner and Piggy and Tazzy's bullying attacks on me after I made it clear to John that I didn't appreciate aforementioned cheap joke, do the maths and you might be able to imagine where I am currently at..."

"This said, I hope you can better understand me and why Sniffy and I break up with bewildering frequencey.

Our current break up has occured due to Sniffy continuing to regard Piggy and Tazzy as her friends which to me, in view of their bullying of me, stinks of disloyalty.How do you suppose you might feel if you found yourself on the recieving end of Piggy and Tazzy's brutal bullying but your own life partner, if you had one, insisted that they continued to love the people who had abused you?I will leave you with that thought.

I wish you well.

Ruthie."

No, the repeated statements aren't down to me being over enthusiastic with my ctrl+v, they're down to Ruthie being mental and pasting the same thing over and over and over again.... on my Facebook page, that colleagues from work have access too, while I'm 8 hours behind and forced to pay $10 per day for wi-fi access to delete them.

Ruthie has an internet  footprint of insanity all over the internet, and probably in many, many places in real life too.  Just do a search for Vegan Heart, Donaldsdevotee, Moonbeamzzz, and the name and her rants against well-meaning people, come up time and time again.  She's been banned from more forums than it might be possible to be banned from, and here's one where she changed her ID, just so she could go back and cause more trouble:

http://www.veganfitness.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=6437&start=0

Of course, I can look back at that crazy, crazy episode now and laugh, laugh a LOT, but the whole thing has left me very wary of who I give my Facebook access to.  And from now on, I will always Google somebody by each of their strange names whenever I encounter them.

One other thing about Facebook is that many people don't update their privacy settings and so it enables others to see what they're up to.  You'll be glad to know that Ruth recently had an interview for a job as a social worker.  Fuck-a-doodle-do!