Early this morning, Katie read my blog post about my Facebook hiatus and called me out on including the number of notifications I had. Of course, she was kidding — or maybe jealous — and we laughed about it, but I’m sure half of those notification don’t even affect me personally. Who can resist spamming your friends to death with game requests? Slot-o-mania, anyone?

The magic number is three, four if I include the gray area. Three as in the number of times I wanted to open Facebook, but didn’t. It helps that the fb shortcut icon is not in my browser bar anymore, or else the magic number might be double what it was.

Remember last night when I said that I was unaware I was going to Facebook when I was going to Facebook? In the middle of writing this short blurb about day 2, I received an email from a Kickstarter project I supported. In the email, my friend included the news that she created a Facebook page for her book. Since I manage a Facebook page for this blog, I was curious to see what her new page looked like. I clicked on the link, completely absent of the thought that I’d be GOING TO FACEBOOK. It wasn’t until I saw that I had 20 notifications that I hurriedly x’ed out.

I have no words.

I wish I would have logged out a couple of nights ago so that these things wouldn’t happen. What surprises me is that I’m fully cognizant that I’m on a fb hiatus, and yet my mind disengages from that reality when I’m looking at a different object that links directly back to fb. It’s like chasing a squirrel into a busy highway, giving up, turning around and then deciding to chase a rabbit into the same highway I decided not to go into. I mean, it’s just crazy.

I’m starting to sympathize with Lenny in Of Mice and Men.

I realize that these experiments are all meaningless to a reader, and for that, I apologize. But it’s a great way to jumpstart my writing habits again.

By the way, I just received a notification on my phone that Katie added a photo of me on Facebook. It wasn’t of me I don’t think, she likely just tagged me. I surprised her with two packages of her favorite kind of Starburst this evening, so maybe she posted that. I guess I’ll find out next Wednesday.