Do you have a minute?

I could tell this morning when I woke up that today was going to be one of those days where I'd be subconsciously ready for all of the stresses that being Zac Malinowski puts on me. I could not tell you what gave me this indication, but it's a distinctive feeling I get from time to time. I asked myself "how do you feel today?" out of the blue and after a few minutes came up with a whole-hearted answer. It was something like "I am irate, dude. I feel as though social interaction has deteriorated in recent years due to the insurgence of social networking sites into next-gen living, all of which sites only give their users an opportunity to display themselves in whatever light he chooses and a catalyst for a generation of selfless egomaniacs to learn how to follow behind a crowd." Wow, Zac. Maybe people should ask you how you feel more often. But I'd been premeditating this for a few minutes or so, in thinking about how in today's society, one man's word is worth so little compared to how much it once was in years previous; how oratory skills only get you as far as the employee-of-the-month board or a few lucky kisses from girls who feel like they deserve a real compliment once in a while, where as back in roman times a skilled orator could make an entire steadfast crowd question their own judgement; how the simple pleasantries like "hello" and "excuse me" and "thank you" escape the majority of our daily lives; and it doesn't quite make sense to me, the ease of these things and the apparent difficulty practicing them. It's a lot like going green, but socially. We can do it, people. If everyone on the planet drove an electric car, everyone will have 100% cleaner air to breathe. This isn't likely to happen, but not because we don't want cleaner air, but because electric cars are expensive as a motherfucker. When nobody litters, our entire landscape looks beautiful. This I've noticed personally in my time on this earth has improved and our landscape is beautiful. But because of how I feel about the social network site, I'm judgemental of it's users, so this may leave my reasons for haveing one a little skewed. Now, I've never needed a thousand friends. I've never needed three-hundred friends. I've never even need forty friends. I've never needed that sort of masturbation. So if all I've ever needed was fifteen friends, in a worst case scenario they all live on opposite ends of the country, and I also in a worst case scenario had a need to keep up with each of them every single day, what is really so hard about just... calling them? Or is it that we all feel so completely alone and isolated and abandoned that we do need three-hundred friends? Think about how much more rewarding a few good words in person or on the phone is than a paragraph in print to one of your close friends. It's so much more real, more alive, more satisfying. It could be that we're all too conditioned to hold our true selves in that we're too afraid to let anyone know that we actually do become bored with seeing and talking to the same people day in and day out, and thus we need a full magazine of friends. Well, that's more of an individualized problem than a group issue. Myself, I will let whoever know that "...I'm just not that into hanging out right now because I've just about gotten my fill of you for the week.". And I'm sorry to those of us who can't accept that we also have friends who get bored of us, because we know it happens. Oh well, right? We've never needed three-hundred friends anyway. Something else that social networking has done for me, is that it lets me sit back with a nice cup of coffee and read about what everybody's been doing since the last time I'd logged in. And if any of your lives are as fucking interesting as mine, we all know how involving of a read that is. When did we stop taking time to think about ourselves and what we're doing with our lives and start thinking about what we can do with ourselves that will look good on our network sites so that all of our friends get to see how much thought we put into what they think? When we're not out at a party where there's nothing but beer drinking, tribal rallies, power struggles and empty conversation going on, taking self potraits with every person there so that we can all look back in five years at how stupid we all were "but look at all the fun we had and how close we were", we're sitting online looking at all the party pictures of the parties we didn't get to go to and affirming how much fun it would have been to have gone. Have you ever looked at how much time that takes to do? Try it next time, recording how much time you spend browsing your chosen network site, and on one of those days, one of those alert and productive days, take that amount of time and spend it thinking about something that makes you angry or sad or enthusiastic, so that the next time someone takes her face and points it in your direction, locks her eyes with yours, warms up her smile and says, "so, how are you feeling today?"
you have something better to say than
"hmm, pretty good, i guess."