Mental commentary

People who know me in real life may be aware that I spend a little bit of time on Facebook. Okay, quite a bit of time. I'm fully prepared to justify it by saying that it's helped me catch up with people with whom I'd lost contact over the years and to keep up with friends in Sydney now that I'm living in Melbourne, etc etc. Those things are indeed true, but also I just like it - I play scrabble and other word games with friends, I check out the photos of people I don't know but who are friends-of-friends (come on, you know we've all done that on Facebook), I stuff around and waste time. It's a diversion and I like it.

One feature of Facebook is the 'status update'. It's a section where you can put in a very short sentence or two stating what you're doing or what you're thinking... in the form of "[Femina] is relaxing" or "[Femina] really should do her housework but would rather play on Facebook instead". It can be pretty useful, actually, because sometimes people update their status to say important things like "So-and-so has a new job".

I quite like the status update feature and like to play around with it - sometimes I'll use it to quote obscure songs or movie lines to see who can work it out. However, I'm finding lately that occasionally I'll carry on a commentary in my head as though I'm updating my status... without actually updating it. Just now I was preparing to try out my new electric line trimmer (which, by the way, was heaps of fun - oh, the destruction!) and found myself thinking, "[Femina] is happy the grass has dried out enough to use her new line trimmer." On the way to plug it in I accidentally kicked my back-door mat and discovered a massive ant infestation living under it. I immediately thought, "[Femina] was not pleased to find a huge ant colony living under her door mat." So... I'm not actually updating my Facebook status; I'm commentating my own life, for my own benefit. In the third person.

No, I'm not weird. Really.