all stories about suicide, adultery, drunkenness, addiction, failure, unrequited love, bad financial planning, greed, envy, impotence and incontinence begin with the words “i have this friend” which is code for “me”. but really, i have this friend.
on facebook, there’s a lot of concern about privacy. people have told me they won’t use facebook because they’re concerned enough that–regardless of the privacy settings they might place on their accounts–facebook is watching. and using their information. storing their information. sharing their information. there is even concern about potential employers asking for passwords to facebook, myspace, linkedin, and other social media accounts as a condition of employment.
remember when your cousin tagged you in a picture in the album “just another friday night in the hood”? mr. boss man will not click “like” and that’s why some states have passed social media protections so that employers are not allowed to ask for passwords. i’m sure they’ll figure out that your password is “studly” and they’re going to find this anyhow.
i live by the rule that nothing is private on facebook. of course, there isn’t a lot a just over the border of fifty years woman is doing that’s scandalous. like, okay, i get tagged in a photo from the album “woman’s board organizational meeting”.
but my friend. i was starting a story about a friend and it’s really about a friend. really. absolutely really. it’s about the words you can’t say on facebook.
on george carlin’s 1972 comedic album “class clown” he delivered a monologue about the seven dirty words — shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.– that you can’t say on television. the monologue and its presentation on the radio (uncensored) led to the supreme court setting new limits on the federal communications commission.
so my friend has a way of expressing herself. and twice in the past week she expressed frustration over her email account not working and the second time over the olympics opening ceremony. her lexicon including “kill myself”. . . and facebook took notice. when she opened her facebook account there was a message from the team.
Hi,
A friend is concerned about your well being. Facebook has an agreement with Samaritans and we have sent them your email address so they can contact you within 24 hours. You can speak to them in confidence. You can find out more about Samaritans atwww.samaritans.org.They can also be reached by email at jo@samaritans.org or by phone. In the UK dial 08457 90 90 90 or in the Republic of Ireland dial 1850 60 90 90.Thanks,
The Facebook Team
Julio
User Operations
Facebook
then my friend was required to click to reach her message box.
Samaritans provides confidential emotional support 24/7 to those experiencing despair, distress or suicidal feelings.
the friend who expressed concern is mr. algorithm. the same mr. algorithm that seems to know that i want to see ads for wrinkle cream and ways to get rid of belly fat. when i open my facebook account, the ads are on the margins, reminding me of my mortality.
so my friend was upset when her email account wasn’t working and who wasn’t as impressed with the olympics opening ceremony as director danny boyle would have liked her to be. and we both learned that the seven words you can’t use on facebook unless you want the good samaritans of the u.k. or the u.s. to contact you. sometimes you’ll have to add the word “myself’. julio from the facebook team will be sending you a note of concern.
kill, shoot, off, hang, seppuku, do. . . in.
maxwell smart had a cool phone in his shoe in the 1960s series “maxwell smart”. . . but you carry surveillance equipment with you all the time. let’s face it, your phone allows the government to track your location, your spending habits, your interests, and your habits. smart? yeah, your phone is smart!
my friend’s experience was pretty creepy. but have you had an experience with this?
and just in case this catches you at a bad moment, the samaritans really are here to help. their homepage is http://www.samaritans.org/
i am very grateful to facebook. if you have an account, you are grateful too. even if you don’t say so. facebook is how you keep up with your family and friends–yeah, right, but it’s also where you hang out, play farmville, castleville and diamond dash, post pictures of your friends lying on a couch passed out with a bottle of jim beam, and where you play the next flashmob coup d’etat of your home country. facebook is a party room in which you are always the v.i.p. facebook is grateful to you because you give the company its biggest asset: the most comprehensive user database in existence. it’s an n.r.a. mailing list on steroids.
in visiting my facebook friends, i have used planes, trains, and automobiles. when you get a flat tire, take it off the car and pour soapy water on it. wherever you see bubbles is where you have a leak! i am working out the details on fixing this one!
facebook was founded in mark zuckerberg’s harvard dorm room in 2004. i joined up in 2007, mostly so i could troll through my sons’ friends lists in order to ascertain whether they were being targeted by predators. i got addicted. i then in 2011 i decided to make the facebook experience a real one–and resolved to visit each of my facebook friends in person.
facebook went public this spring and was initially offered at $38 per share. this past friday, facebook closed at slightly under $23. investors are dumping the stock, in part because facebook faces a challenge in servicing users who have iphones, android and tablets. somehow i think the zuckerberg team will figure this one out.
christian bertelsen–chief investment dude at the global financial private capital company–calls facebook a “tomorrow stock” and he’s right. facebook is nothing to invest in if you are going to check out the stock price every day, every hour, every minute. which means that the exact sort of person who uses facebook–and updates their status every day, every hour, every minute–is exactly the wrong candidate to be a facebook shareholder.
mark, i believe in you. actually, i believe in the incredible database that you’ve accumulated which allows companies to target advertising with such precision. which is why i keep seeing ads on my page about how to get rid of wrinkles and belly fat. p.s. thank you and facebook friend tony tyner for the birthday wishes!
so i say buy facebook stock. buy lots of it. and then don’t check for updated status. give it three years, which on a facebook timeline is like eternity. amazon went through a similar bust-o and folks were talking about it being “just a bookstore” on the internet–now amazon is retailer to the world.
mark zuckerberg has the best incentive to make facebook work. he was worth $19.1 billion on the day of the i.p.o. and now you’re worth a paltry $11.9 billion (after selling off 30 million shares to raise money to feed the i.r.s.). it’s hardly enough money to live on.
mark, you can send me diamonds out of your petty cash drawer! i don’t think you’re motivated by the money–as you have said, “we don’t build services to make money, we make money so we can build better services.”
christmas, valentine’s day, mother’s day, my birthday. the four dread horsemen of the calendar. from a distance, wonderful and appealing. the moment of impact? horrific. well, maybe not the moment of impact. it’s the night before. i always think i will be forgotten by those i love. and everyone else. and i’ve had those years.
i was put up for adoption by my parents when i was three years old. after twenty two years, i used a private detective to track down my natural/biological parents justin and aleta. today there’s open adoptions. there’s tracking your parents down on facebook. or maury povich.
when the future queen of france was sent from austria to meet her husband the future louis the xvi, at the border she was required to change her name from maria antonia to marie antoinette and to strip naked and re-dress in clothes provided by the french. she also had to give up her dog and her ladies in waiting. in 1963 when i was adopted, my name was changed from arlynn merrill leiber to lynn melody patrick, i took no clothes with me from my old home, and i gave up my stuffed kitten. i did not get jewelry and versailles. on the other hand, i didn’t get beheaded. go see farewell my quee. after all, it’s been three long years since a marie antoinette movie has been playing in theaters!
i thought i had a good (or at least okay) relationship with these new/old parents and it surprised me that both forgot my birthday the first year we were in contact. i would like to say that i didn’t mind that justin and aleta didn’t remember. but i did. i howled and whined. i was a petty, sniveling, blotchy faced wreck. but in private. a few days later, justin reminded me that my infant half sister casey’s birthday was coming up and i said it was interesting that we shared the same astrological sign. a dozen roses showed up the next morning with a belated birthday greeting. as for my mother aleta, the matter resurfaced in october. she called me in a fury. i had forgotten her birthday.
“but you never told me when your birthday was!” i wailed. “and besides, you forgot mine!”
“how was i supposed to know yours?” aleta countered.
“because you were there!”
as you can imagine, this interaction didn’t help our relationship. i think i hold aleta responsible for my adoption although since aleta and justin were married it must have been a joint decision at some level. i know if my ex-husband had ever asked me to put up joseph or eastman for adoption, i would have balked. not that he ever would have. eight years after this conversation, aleta terminated our relationship over an issue involving my payment of her health insurance. justin and i have our ups and downs–and some years he remembers my birthday and some years he doesn’t.
on july 22 every year i have a massive anxiety attack slash pity party. this year was no exception. it started at five o’clock with the shakes and chest pain. it ramped up with crying and shaking. i was utterly and completely convinced that i was forgotten, alone, without purpose, and about to die. it would be months before anybody would notice my demise.
how does santa know where you are if you’ve sold your house? this past month, a new family moved in and i haven’t got my bearings. it would be massively worse if santa were to die! but that won’t happen because as long as there are children and retail establishments who believe in him he will live!
and then something odd happened. a facebook friend posted a picture of a birthday cake on my profile page. another posted a link to a recording of mickey mouse singing happy birthday. then a link to youtube showed up, and it was my friend jose’s youtube post for my day — you can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VluSLAGdwY&feature=youtu.be
and there were messages and pokes and comments and postings. and i started to write thank you’s. and more thank you’s. i rifled through an album of fifty two pictures created by my friend nit, whom i had traveled to visit in las vegas — the messages embedded within the pictures are really wonderful and there’s one for every year of my life. https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2284501568258.62614.1720445328&type=3&l=5d25bd20fa
i even received a birthday greeting from mark zuckerberg, the founder of facebook. he’s pictured here with tony tyner, mr. 314, meaning that tony is the 314th facebook friend i have met. hey, many thanks mark and tony! btw, married life must be treating you nicely, mark, because you look like you’ve put on a few pounds!
i needed to say thank you to each person and that took me most of my birthday but it was a wonderful way to notice, remember, reconnect with each friend. because even if facebook automatically puts a notification on your page reminding you of which friends are having birthdays, it still takes thought and care to write out a greeting or post a picture or photoshop an image just for me!
i realized that i had cried because i thought i was forgotten and i sure as heck wasn’t. in fact, all told, i wrote eleven hundred notes of thanks yesterday and today and i’m still behind. sending each thank you changed my perspective, and turned me around.
thank you facebook!
and also thank you to facebook for an interesting feature: every time a friend posts on your wall, your mutual friends are notified. so, for instance, when my son eastman’s friend will (who was the 176th facebook friend i met with) sent me a “happy birthday mrs. presser” eastman would have been informed. and in a remarkable coincidence eastman called me about twenty minutes after will’s message. he says he’s sent me a package but that it won’t get to me for a few days.
i don’t know where eastman sent this package but i figure if santa can keep track of every little child, eastman can certainly find his mom. i just hope santa or a package shows up at the daughters of the american revolution meeting where i’ve been invited to speak on thursday evening. oh, but i forget that santa won’t be available–he’s in tahiti because this is his off season!
meanwhile, my other son joseph (the sixty first facebook friend) sent me a present that will change my life. i will assemble it today!
facebook was originally a term given to the student directories that certain schools gave out to make remembering the name of the cute dude in calculus easier. harvard, where mark zuckerberg attended, didn’t have a facebook but several of the fraternities and sororities had their own individual facebooks.
mark had a little fun by hacking into the databases for these facebooks and creating “facemash” — an online game of “hot or not” in which players rated side by side pictures of their classmates. the game attracted 450 players and 22,000 views in the first four hours. mark got into some trouble and was nearly expelled but then he decided that “facemash” had tapped into some primal needs for connection and for looking at cute potentials. facemash didn’t ask players to rate pictures of adorable kittens, inspirational thoughts, or team logos–all of which have been or are presently used by some of my facebook friends!
mark played around with other similar applications, eventually hitting on what we now use as facebook. facebook sometimes makes us believe we have a rich and varied social life when we really haven’t even gotten out of bed all day. and facebook sometimes brings people together who wouldn’t normally interact. one of the surprises of my new years resolution to meet my facebook friends was discovering how different and yet how similar i am to my friends.
this past week i went to los angeles with two chaperones reggie gholston and vincent peters. i sometimes take chaperones because it’s a good safety measure.
i also took these chaperones because reggie (on the left) is being deployed to afghanistan in a few weeks. he will be gone for a year and my “care” packages will include smokes, toilet paper, and food. both vince and reggie are my facebook friends, but they are more than that. they are my buddies.
one of the facebook friends i wanted to meet was #324 brandon day. he is a twentysomething genius who ran into a bit of trouble a few years ago when he experienced full on agoraphobia. it was difficult for him to explain to his family and friends what he was going through–panic attacks that made it impossible for him to get beyond the front door. i think with facebook people can connect and relate their common experiences and they don’t feel so alone or so weird.
and that’s an even more important application of mark zuckerberg’s genius than offering the world the opportunity to rate their fellow humans hot or not.
brandon’s genius is in the creation of phone apps, video games and whatnot. through the magic of facebook i am friends with sarah, whom i visited in detroit. she is agoraphobic. and she wants very much to create video games, which she oughta be real good at because video games is how she gets through her day. i introduced the two of them via facebook and when i met brandon we had a message for her.
brandon is working on a phone application and website to help agoraphobics like sarah and our fondest wish is that the three of us will be together for lunch in los angeles, detroit, chicago, london, paris, rome?
meanwhile, on the other coast, last night i received a message from facebook friend michele piersiak. she lives in staten island and has had trouble leaving the house for a year. i visited her and she felt i was “safe” to walk around the neighborhood with. we talked about major goals–hers is to become a psychologist who helps people with social anxieties. and then we talked about minor goals. i think of minor goals as the things that may sound silly to other people but they are building blocks for your major goal. michele’s is to have dinner at laconde verde, a restaurant in manhattan owned by robert deniro. there are reservations under my name for august ninth! in order to do that, she has had to make mini-goals of walking around her neighborhood on her own, going to shops and stores, using public transportation. just yesterday, she readied herself for the laconde verde lunch by going to lunch with facebook pal carolyn quinn. facebook matchmaking.
you can play hot or not on facebook, but i think facebook and other social networking sites have a lot more to offer. or maybe i am just worried i’d get a “not”!
after saying goodbye to brandon, the chaperones and i headed for las vegas where we would ultimately end up with friendship tragedy. still, if our adventure could be a moviemash it would be “driving miss daisie” and “the hangover”. . .
facebook challenges the notion of a world of nations bound by geographical borders and nationally shared identities. facebook nation will, by the end of the summer, have a citizenry of over 900 million. which makes facebook’s census figures just shy of those of china or of the entire african continent. facebook has a government insofar as SOMEBODY is making the rules. i figure mark zuckerberg is king and his wife priscilla chan our queen. facebook national travel policy? you can go anywhere as long as your passport is stamped “like”!
kate and william, by comparison are of a royal family that rules over the united kingdom, population 62 million, and it’s roughly twice the size of the state of new york. happy anniversary wills and kate!
facebook citizens can be separated by oceans or seated side by side at computers (or any reasonably intelligent phone).
i’ve been thinking about national boundaries in the past week. in 2011, i began a journey that has hopscotched around the world and around my geographic country of america–all to meet my facebook friends, my fellow citizens of a country without borders. before this journey, this resolution, i had never purchased a plane ticket for myself. didn’t have a valid passport (only about one third of americans actually have one). and i had never been out of the country before. making a commitment to meet every one of my facebook friends in person has changed all that.
for most countries, a visa–a permission to enter the country–is either a fee one pays at the airport or just a wave hello from an official after you stand in line for a while. other countries are a bit more stringent. i sweated through several weeks waiting for my visa to india. and it cost a lot of money. this week i’m sweating through waiting on three visas to brazil. brazil is feeling a bit bruised because american policy about allowing brazilians into america has become more of a hassle since 9/11. wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all belonged to the nation of facebook where there are no boundaries?
for the most part, i try to have a chaperone when i am traveling to see a facebook friend i’ve never met before. reggie has twice been my chaperone. without him, i’m sure i’d still be in mexico city at the plaza revolucion eating ice cream and chatting with my facebook friend yoshi maeshiro whom i met on facebook because he is a fan of my grandfather who wrote science fiction novels.
reggie is my chaperone for brazil, as is one other facebook friend vincent peters. reggie is about to be deployed to afghanistan. he cannot personally visit a brazilian consulate without going offbase. so vince is pleading his cause at the brazilian consulate in washington. meanwhile, i have gotten my shots and filled out my paperwork. it’s very unnerving to hand over one’s passport to a representative of another country and have them say “we’ll get back to you on this.” i do what i do because i believe strongly that if we are only interacting on the internet we are not fully engaged. we are only friends if we can cement that friendship with reality. we leave for brazil next week. between now and then i need to learn the words i learn for every country i visit: hello, goodbye, thank you and friendship!
i have been packing up a quarter century of my life, my ex-husband’s life, my two stepchildren’s lives, my own children’s lives. it’s sometimes surprising to come across a book, a drawing, a sportsmanship award for which kid and what sport? i have cried looking at little blobs of clay that were once handed to me with great pride and an “i made this for you, mommy!” but i don’t have to worry about the next phase of my life, because at least i have my job.
well, i have a job on facebook!
i am friends with f2fb friend #318 arthur frank, the father of the delightful gal in the video. he owns round table books and he was just as surprised to discover that i am now listed as being employed at his establishment. oddly, he has not offered me a salary. or a corner office. on the other hand, i haven’t offered to show up and do actual, like, work. one of the very odd things about being fifty one is that a lot of employment skills are difficult to implement or to prove to a potential employer without some major practice. for instance, if i were set loose behind a starbucks espresso machine, i’m sure the company’s share price would drop as precipitously as facebook’s share price.
don’t cry for me, mark zuckerberg! mr. z. has been having some problems of his own even while he’s honeymooning in italy! because of the facebook share price plunge, his net worth has gone from an estimated $20 billion to a paltry $14 billion AND he’s been dropped from forbes magazine’s top forty wealthiest folks list!
still, he has even more of a problem–mr. z. set off an italian controversy worthy of a tempermento tantrum enorme! he doesn’t tip. no, not at all. not a a euro at the coffee shop. not a euro at the cozy sidewalk cafe. not a euro at the little corner romantic pasta joint. i went around the world to meet my facebook friends last year and i tipped everywhere. i gotta ask . . .
arthur might not want to employ me, but he is the owner of a business that will help me. help me with disposing of the many books i have acquired over the last twenty five years. round table books takes books on consignment, sells them, and if it can’t sell them, it donates the books to charity. go visit their website–maybe they can help you find a book you’re looking for or take care of a book you need to find a new home for! www.roundtablebooks.com right now they have a lot of arlynn presser and vivian leiber books–i wrote under the name vivian leiber for many years.
but arthur’s not doing this alone. he is employing my f2fb friend #319 eric c. carley who reminded me that there is a very honorable means for a femme seul to live in winnetka–for free!
erin, who i guess qualifies as my co-worker at round table books, will come to my house to take away all the books of so many years. she house sits for people in winnetka and that means she gets to live for free in some of the finest homes–if you want to housesit in your town, go to your local realtor and ask if there are homes that have been temporarily emptied of their owners. you might find yourself in a beautiful mansion!
so next time you look at my facebook page, you’ll notice that i’m employed at round table books. i wonder if mark zuckerberg would like to give me a job. . . at least on facebook!
last week, it was all about the facebook initial public offering (ipo) making billionaires out of the facebook team, about the ipo revitalizing the united states stock market, about investors clamoring for a piece of the $38 per share pie! facebook was bigger than elvis, jesus, and the beatles combined!
last week, mark’s fiancee priscilla graduated from medical school, he had a birthday, there was the great day when facebook shares were made available to the public for the first time and, of course, there was the wedding. this week? maybe it’s a good idea that mark and priscilla are on their honeymoon. because investors think their honeymoon with facebook is over!
shares opened at $38 and have struggled to keep above $32 ever since. one startling accusation/development has occurred: jp morgan, morgan stanley and goldman sachs cut their price estimates and VERBALLY advised their largest institutional investors to be wary of the facebook ipo. the smaller investors were not given the benefit of this advice. and where did this negativity come from? the three companies have indicated that a facebook executive, again VERBALLY, that the facebook financial situation wasn’t all that great and that expected revenues were going to be lower than expected.
there will be investigations, there will be further drops in the stock price, i suspect it will bottom out at $16 per share. at least, that’s when i’m going to start chipping in.
so a downer day for facebook and a bit of a downer day for me. i woke up with an anxiety attack that i tried to ward off with meditation and then with a run. i tried writing down ten things i was grateful for–a mental exercise that usually does the trick–but i couldn’t get past three before the internal “i’m dying of a heart attack” scream took over. i caved, and took four ativan. spent the rest of the day in a bit of a haze. but as the great philosopher and femme fatale said “tomorrow is another day!”
what a week for mark zuckerberg! on monday, his girlfriend of nine years — priscilla chan — graduated from stanford university medical school AND it was his birthday! he posted “I’m so proud of you, Dr. Chan” during the commencement ceremony. aww, ain’t love grand?
then facebook shares became available to the public and institutional investors for the first time. it was an incredible payday for the private investors who have supported facebook until now. the private investors have risked everything on an idea–that ordinary people want to look up old friends, find new ones, play hidden chronicles, and post pictures of their adorable ___ (cat, dog, baby, grandmother, thing they made for dinner). those investors, and mark, were right. facebook shares opened at $38 per share and are holding steady as i write this.
mark’s fortune is now so vast that relationship advice expert donald trump opined that a naive young billionaire often makes bad moves, saying “they get married, and then for some reason over the next couple of years they get divorced and then she sues him for $10 billion and she hits the jackpot. I’m notoriously cheap with these things, I think if she made $1 million, that would be very good.” that donald, always an optimist!
the movie “the social network” makes it sound like mark was a bit of, ahem, loser with women. actually, he and priscilla have been dating for nine years. they’ve been together during the tough times and the really great times. for my wedding present to the zuckerbergs, i’m going to give them a photo album entitled “my trip to the grand canyon”, a link to a leah silberman music video and a list of all my friends! oh, wait, they already have that! p.s. don’t they look adorable pictured here in their backyard at the wedding?
so one day after facebook went public, mark zuckerberg changed his status from single to married and wrote a pithy post: “Married Priscilla Chan”. . . it has a lot of ‘likes’. . . .
a curious financial note that the donald might not have thought of: let’s say i’m a billionaire.
okay, i had to have a few moments to close my eyes and think about that one! back to business!
i’m a billion. my girlfriend (her name, just hypothetically, is priscilla) is a pediatrician who wants to open up a clinic for underprivileged children. i want to give her, say, a billion to build the clinic of her dreams. if she’s my girlfriend, the transfer taxes are awful–the internal revenue service will have an agent on my doorstep asking for their share of the money toot sweet! that’s french for jimmy johns fast–
but if i want to give my wife (again, just hypothetically named priscilla) a billion dollars to open a clinic, it’s what the i.r.s. call a “nontaxable event”. the i.r.s. hates nontaxable events–if they could figure out a way to make taking a nap on the lounge chair in your backyard a taxable event, they would! personally, i think the world has come out on top. mark owns all our personal information because we have an implacable human need to connect. priscilla makes medical care available to kids who might otherwise not be able to get it. and love reigns! too bad about the i.r.s.
but i wonder what you think …
and, of course, i wonder–did they invite all their facebook friends?
i’m not actually friends with mark zuckerberg — or the other founders of facebook, dustin moskovitz, eduardo saverin, and chris hughes. but i feel like we should be. after all, mark and his friends started facebook in 2004 at harvard university as a way for students to check out other students–it replaced a paper bound directory that couldn’t keep up to date on everybody’s relationship status. by 2007, i was posting pictures, tracking down folks i went to high school with and playing online scrabble with facebook friends i’d never met.
about that relationship status. i was separated from my husband and mark had still not figured out that “it’s complicated” is a good status. i listed “single” and a few short months later my husband joined facebook, sent a friend request and was pretty darned unhappy that i was jumping the gun on the american divorce court system. we agreed to defriend each other and although we are very much divorced we are very friendly. it’s . .. complicated.
but mark, we were talking about mark. and the founders of facebook and the other private shareholders of facebook. up until yesterday, they were the sole investors in facebook. with an initial public offering (ipo), those shares are let loose on the public market and anybody can be a facebook shareholder.
ah, the winklevoss twins! they went to harvard with mark and they thought they were part of the creation of facebook. this was the point of two lawsuits between the twins and mark. as part of a settlement of one of those suits, the winklevoss twins own six million shares of facebook. caution: do not invite this trio to the same potluck supper!
so the offering of shares yesterday was a little like the story of goldilocks and the three bears–set the initial price of the shares too low and the private shareholders don’t get as much dough, set the price too high and institutional traders won’t bite and the price will plummet and everybody will think your company sucks.
the facebook shares were initially offered at $38 a share when mark rang the opening bell at nasdaq trading headquarters. after rising and abruptly falling the price of the shares returned to just under $40 per share at the closing bell. does that mean the initial price was just right?
thursday was a big day for mark, the founders, the shareholders, and new investors! but it was a regular day for facebook employees (many of whom, by the way, own shares in the company). at one of the company cafeterias at the menlo park, california headquarters, the day began with a breakfast of strawberry banana soy smoothies, coconut mango smoothies, whole wheat cranberry orange scones, sausage and biscuit hash with cream gravy, whole wheat choco-chip pancakes with vanilla whipped cream, whole wheat low fat flax waffles, and old-fashioned buttermilk pancakes. Meals are always free for facebook employees. i would totally screw up my diet!
best wishes to mark and facebook! mark and some other visionaries are very rich now. so rich that they can’t attend occupy wall street rallies anymore. but they provided us with a service we needed to keep in touch, to play that scrabble and to share with the world cute pictures of our cat.
last year, i made a new years resolution to meet all my facebook friends. i was a scaredy cat who didn’t leave the house much and i wanted to know who all these friends were! the resolution changed me. i have to say . . . thank you, mark!
i would jump out of a cake but i think it would be alarming. i am, after all, fifty one years old and while i have been adhering to the atkins diet and am nearly back to my fighting weight of 138 there have been some, ahem! changes to the general physique since i was twenty eight. which is mark’s age today!
mark is not even my facebook friend! yet, i wish him a happy birthday! i don’t feel too bad about not sending a birthday present because next week is the fabulous facebook IPO — facebook is valued at nearly 100 billion dollars!
mark could wake up tomorrow morning, spend $300,000 and do it again the next day and the next until he’s eighty and he’d have some left over. talk about being ready for your retirement!
i’m fifty one years old. i’m packing up a lifetime of stuff. in t minus forty three days i will say goodbye to the house i have lived in for so long. i am scared. i was weepy this morning, so much so that i cried when the grocery clerk said “have a nice day”. . . so i wonder:
arlynnpresser 