Ireland has run out of salt

(From my Facebook page)

Lucy Foley   Ireland has run out of salt.

Michael  i heard about this...don't go outside.

about an hour ago

Kelsey I heard that the Netherlands have resorted to using fragrant bath salts on their roads.

about an hour ago

Lucy Foley All the supermarkets are even out of domestic salt(If you've lived anywhere actually cold, you'll recognise that -4 is not even all that freakily cold, actually) and the whole country is throwing up its hands and running around doing the funky chicken. But slipping and falling over, because there is no salt down.

5 mins ago

Lucy Foley  Kelsey: The Dutch probably do that anyway. Feckin' hippies.

about a minute ago

The Red Man In The Door

Do you have to be on facebook to see this? Is that how it works? A short play of mine will be performed in London on Sunday. You're welcome. The play is called "The Red Man In The Door" and it has been described as a "brilliant new short play" by Rebecca Atkinson-Lord. We will see.

Eamon

There is another reason for turning the volume down on one of your facebook friends. It is because their status updates and comments and links and posts drive you crazy and you don't understand it but they make you feel tired, just to read them.

One such is a man I met in a garden in New York, on my last day in the city in 2003, until I returned almost four years later. He turned out to be my third cousin. Pretty remarkably closely related, his father and my grandmother were first cousins. This kind of detail matters to me, a lot. I have found a long-lost cousin in remarkable circumstances, in every place I have lived in, now.

My cousin in Denmark I had not met since we were both 2, in Limerick. I met him again when I performed at an arts festival in Denmark. As I left the stage, and the venue, he came running after me, shouting, "Lucy come back! It's your cousin, Brian!" He said I hadn't changed much since I was 2. He recognised me. Fucking Nora (Nora was the name of a grandaunt to both of us).

And this one in New York, we met in a garden, as I said, in the east village. He started talking to me, asking about where in Ireland I was from. His surname and my grandmother's were the same, and they came from the same place. That was an epiphany, a kinship made in the city, a sign to return. I have made some overtures toward contact, facebook being one of them. But he doesn't seem able to say hello. It is easier, I suppose, to click 'confirm' on a friend request in your inbox, from the safety of the distance of your familiar computer, than to meet the unknown yet blood related, in another human being.

He is a rocknroll musician and I think he is probably very lonely.

The Facebook Post

I'm up to 15 people I've turned the volume down on, but do not want to unfriend, on facebook. I've muted them for different reasons. Some because I think it's just plain weird to be getting daily feeds about banalities from lives of people I don't know very well/am not hugely interested in, but there are also some I've detuned because they endlessly post soppy/sentimental status messages, and there are a couple of people I have initiated some kind of direct communication with, who haven't responded, so it seems weird to keep hearing about them in an exclusively passive way.

Kind of like that friend you had once with whom you used to have Very Long Phonecalls, where they talked Endlessly about their personal life, family, thoughts, random passing bullshit, and never really thought to ask you how you were, or allow any space between the inhalations to listen. But the cutesy messages probably bother me more. You know? It's like living in a world where people are really really tired all the time, but they think that if they are 'positive' about everything, that some of the bad shit will go away. I can't dig it.

And then there are the people who treat facebook like it is their personal sitcom and everybody is there to be their canned laughter. That's alright though, I mean facebook is not exactly Tolstoy.

I've only ever unfriended one person on facebook, in the 10 months I've had a profile on it. That was a dude who was always acting out his relationship on facebook. You know the sort of thing? Like the whole relationship was this fantasic fantasy of amazingness that had to be validated and posted about in a plethora of ways, daily. Mwa mwa my gorgeous darling girlfriend who I love love love mwa mwa so much every day I see you I think how gorgeous you are and you are the light of my life kind of thing. Nasty. I tried turning the volume down on him, but he still showed up in my feed. It was just a drag. It's also a lot to do with how many people you've friended. The fewer, the more they feature individually. You can also turn volume up on people. I haven't done that yet.

But the main thing about facebook is my vibe with it. I just can't seem to get enthusiastic about their status messages, which is reasonable enough when you get even slightly meta about it, but you know, I seem happy to ramble on on Twitter when the mood takes me. See, the thing is that the mood does take me on Twitter. It's just more of a conversation, an interaction. It's actually moderately interesting, sometimes. Though I'm still in Twitter for the potential rather than the actual yet, and I've been tweeting for a year now. But it's more chilled, more fun, less shouty.

But let's be honest. The whole thing is, of course, a load of bollocks.

Tweet me!

So I joined Twitter and Facebook as initiatives toward having a more interactive relationship with the internet, which takes up, as it is, so much of my day. Facebook is easy: so many people are on it. Twitter, for those of you who don't know it, is the "What are you doing right now?" question on Facebook, and that is the full extent of what it is. Twitter is exciting in terms of group communications and short burst information sharing. I love the idea of Twitter and the accessibility of it. I have, however, only got four contacts on it. It's on its way up of course, but for now, it's still a little underground compared to Facebook. And really, though I log into Facebook at least once a day lately, there is so much about it that is overly fussy, with an arseways sense of privacy, and heightened appetite for bollockry. Twitter is an open platform, with, as far as I can see, no bullshit applications, and no vampires sent to 'bite', courtesy of the more inane aspects of your friends and acquaintances...

So basically, I'm rooting for Twitter, but most of the internet's social traffic is currently on Facebook and Myspace. My Myspace profile is like some atoll in the middle of the Pacific: totally inaccessible to all but the very rich or adventurous, or those who are native to the atoll. I haven't even visited my own Myspace page in a Very Long Time. Well, I really just need to make another one, so, um, well, yeah.

So, currently, only one of my Twitter contacts is a regular Twitterer, and boy is she a regular Twitterer, so I'm getting a steady stream of what are basically diary entries from her. Now, she's an entertaining writer though a somewhat remote acquaintance, but what's really odd about it is that I get this steady feed from her, through Twitter. I feel like I'm finding out too much about her. This thing needs a little biodiversity... so, if you feel like doing so, you can join Twitter and find me there, under herecomeslucy. Lets broaden this ecosystem!