For a long time, I resisted. This was partly for privacy reasons (though ironically, one of the people who in the end convinced me to sign up through multiple invites was one of my favorite InfoSec professors), but mostly it was because I didn’t want my information overload problem to get any worse.

Call it my fear of artificially induced A.D.D.

And when an old-school lifelong friend of mine tried to talk me into it, I resisted that too, at least initially. But then, after finding out how much of my high school class was online and knowing my twenty-year reunion was coming up, I succumbed. And as much as aspects of it annoyed me, being able to talk to wonderful people I hadn’t seen in decades was great.

Email requires consciously contacting people. Facebook was like passing people in the hallway and getting a little window on their lives – the choice to comment (or not) was mine. And, to be quite honest, it’s allowed me some RL opportunities that not being on Facebook wouldn’t have (mostly, the chance to see old friends who wouldn’t have known where I was otherwise as they passed through Denver or Munich).

There’s a reason even rational people sell their attention and privacy to Mark Zuckerberg.

That doesn’t make a good idea, but there’s a reason for it.

In this world where we all abandon the villages which would have helped us become adults, raise our children, be families, and grow old together, in some sense, Facebook allows us to reconstruct those villages, if imperfectly. I see my friends’ kids grow from across an ocean, get parenting advice from old friends, laugh with people I love. Especially in my situation, where my meager support system was completely obliterated by moving to another continent and where the language around me isn’t the one I dream in, it’s had particular value.

But… I know better.

Facebook’s sole interest in keeping your information private begins and ends with keeping you around so that they can sell your attention and your data. (This is the same, let’s face it, for any “free” service provider – *ahem* Google *cough*) If the pull of the relationships you’re maintaining is much stronger than your desire to keep your information private – or if the policy is confusing enough that you think your information is private when it isn’t – you’ll stick around, and they can continue doing whatever they do with your data. And given that they change their privacy policies on a daily basis, well, generally, Facebook wins that battle.

I’m a smart girl – I know better – and yet I know I’ll lose touch with some people I adore when I leave.

It’s not their fault – life is incredibly busy, and while you may love browsing the pictures of your high school locker partner when you can do it casually, contacting her directly is work. After a long day of work and kids and commutes and blah blah blah, who needs more work? Sometimes, reading a whole blog post seems like work.

Of course, that’s probably because we’ve all had our attention spans shattered by reading mass quantities of Twitter and Facebook updates. I find myself skimming posts because of it that I would have read before. In fact, I’m going to be shocked if anyone reads this far.

But.

Rationality has to win out eventually. I hope – I sincerely hope – friends will still make contact with me once I’ve deleted my Facebook account tonight. I know lots of folks will try to talk me out of it, but it’s the right thing to do. Call it reallocation of attention and an attempt to control which information Facebook owns about me in the future.

(N.B. Even if Facebook claims (and I don’t know that they even do) to delete all information associated with an account, one would be a fool to believe they actually do.)

Look, as a person, I’m actually not all that private, but I am intensely aware of what I make public when I tweet or post here. But because Facebook feels like you’re having private conversations with your closest 300 friends, you tend to have the private conversations you wouldn’t have on public channels. And Facebook has – and keeps – all of that information.

Not good.

It’s the price you’re paying to chat with your bandmate from senior year.

So: much as I am going to miss contact with friends, I’m deleting my account. I need – and want – to reallocate my attention away from Facebook.

I’m not disappearing from the Internet – I’m not even completely avoiding Short Attention Span Theater (i.e. I’ll still be on Twitter) – but I’m going to delete my Facebook account for good.

So, old pals, if you’ve read this far (or you find this post later) and you still want to find me…

Blog: http://blog.kgrothoff.org
Website: http://kgrothoff.org
Email: krista at kgrothoff dot org
Twitter: @kristamonster

Skype and RL phone calls on request (the latter cost me nothing in a large part of the world), snail mail address available if you email me.

I’ll delete the account late tonight CEST. I have very mixed feelings, but I’ve been threatening to do this for more than a year and never go through with it. No, I don’t think I’m so important that this has a major impact on anyone’s life, but there are some beloved people with whom I have only maintained contact with through Facebook that I don’t want to disappear from without a trace.

N.B. I’m well aware there are other alternatives developing out there – Diaspora, for one. We’ll see. And Twitter has its own issues, but that’s for another post.

Of course, this still means that one lucky person on my list is still eligible to tell embarrassing stories about my youth, if she so chooses. Fortunately, I met her when I was 24, so I somehow managed to avoid a quarter-century of stories being told (I’ve known one of the people on yesterday’s list since I was 6 months old, and the other since I was 12 or so, so there was a lot of potential for embarrassment there ). So Christie, if you’re reading this, just know that you’re entitled to tell any story you like, even if it’s about that married Finnish businessman thinking I was hitting on him at the Crazy Horse when I totally was not.

(N.B. for the Peanut Gallery: I totally was not. I’ve never hit on a married guy in my life who I wasn’t personally married to, thankyouverymuch!)

Oh, and not that one about the train station. You know which one I mean…

Oh, and I managed to get work done on Torsten’s christening gown, which is a good thing, since I have exactly two weeks to finish it before we leave the country. I will probably screw it up anyway and he’ll end up being baptized in an Elmo T-shirt, but we’ll see…

Anyhow, back to snuggling the baby, who has just managed to disassemble his Evil Lion Playgym (I SO wish it were actually called that) and is somehow across the floor (with the playgym, I might add, which is a feat), even though he cannot crawl yet.

Daaaaaaaangerous baby!

In any event, that’s beside the point. The first time it caught up to me was grad school, where I heard it described many times as feeling out like you started out a semester behind, and it only got worse from there.

But nothing, I repeat nothing, compares to the vortex of lateness that swallows you when you have a baby.

N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

The worst part is that you’re so tired at the end of the day that you tend to only do things that require little time and attention, and you put off the important things until later, when you can spend the time on them they require.

For me, this means that, for example, important e-mail/snail mail to people I love gets put aside for a later day if it’s something that’s going to take a while, and I’ve realized, now that Torsten is a whopping 7 months old, that “a later day” may well mean “never” if I don’t start doing something about it.

So I’ve decided to start with the e-mail queue. Three a day until I get through the backlog (or the apocalypse arrives, thus wiping out my inbox for me). JoAnna, Christie and Quisha, you’re first on the list. And if there’s not something in your inbox from me by, oh, say, tomorrow morning, you are allowed to beat me and/or tell embarrassing anecdotes about my youth as a guest blogger here.

If that doesn’t motivate me, I don’t know what will

Congrats to Sarah on the birth of her beautiful son Kees (a lovely Dutch name! Yay Dutch!) and to LaQuisha on her gorgeous daughter Madyson!

Welcome to the world, little ones ) (Now come over to play with Torsten and plot your world takeover already )

That’s all for now. Hope everyone is well, and I hope to be back with more soon…

I have a lot to be thankful for this year, and so here’s my partial list, in no particular order:

1. Christian. I never would have guessed when we met that one person could bring so much love, humor, honesty, kindness, warmth and understanding into my life. He’s a fantastic husband, a wonderful partner, a great (and evil!) friend, and he’s going to be a brilliant father. He has been unfailingly supportive and loving, which, with everything that has happened this year, has been a godsend. Plus he has amazing power to withstand pregnancy mood swings! I’m not sure why the universe granted me such a wonderful gift, but I am very, very grateful.
2. My wonderful friends, near and far, real-life and virtual. I would not have made it through this pregnancy without you all, and I am really, truly blessed to have such love, caring and humor in my life. I only hope I can return the favor
3. Small Monster. As I said, the list is in no particular order, and all I can say is that I am awed that we get to be your parents, and I cannot wait to meet you.
4. Three people who I’ve never had the opportunity to thank, and who may not understand what it is for: Elmer Jacobson, Louis Gelina and, above all, the late Marlin Pendleton. I should have thanked you long ago, but only in this year of turmoil have I been put in a position to realize how much I owe you. None of you would understand how the validation you gave me so many years ago impacted who I am (and am not) in my mid-30′s, but I owe you all a huge debt of gratitude for listening, caring, and believing in me when those who were supposed to did not. Only now am I realizing how easy it would have been to succumb to that despair and anger, to fall into the vicious circle your intervention interrupted, and I owe you gratitude for a not insignificant part of the adult happiness in my life. So I thank you from the bottom of my heart, even if some of you will never have the opportunity to see this. And to Mr. P, you are missed.
5. My parents-in-law. No, they would not expect to see this, but I know they will be good, stable, caring grandparents to our child, and whatever our differences, significant though they are, my son will be lucky to have them in his life, regardless of distance or my feelings about our relationship or anything else. They raised two wonderful children, and I know they will be good to our Small Monster.
6. The rest of my husband’s family, who are simply awesome people, and for whom I am inexpressibly grateful!
7. A warm house, a nice city to live in, food on the table, love, and lots and lots of snuggling. Life is good.
8. A healthy pregnancy – given my age and size, I could have expected so much worse, and am blessed to have had such an easy time of it so far. I can only hope labor goes as well!
9. A sense of humor – because, let’s face it, without one, I would have gone nuts by now!
10. Ok, I can’t leave it at 9. So I’ll make a 10th to make it all round and pretty. Chocolate. One should always be thankful for chocolate

There are certainly half-a-billion other things I should be thankful for, but those are the biggies that come to mind in my pre-cooking procrastination.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, all!

Yayyyyyyyy!

But I am woefully behind on writing and blog-reading. Oh soooooooooooooo woefully behind. Part of this is busyness, part of this is being tired and in some pain, and part of it was, frankly, some annoyance that the perpetrators of the FFD™ (something that I am finally starting to get past through sheer force of will) are getting rather persistent about trying to read my blog in order to find out what’s going on with me. The key word here is trying, but eventually they will succeed because I simply don’t have the obsession, energy or time to think so much about them that I remain ever-vigilant about them reading a public blog, and as long as I don’t know about it and they don’t bother me, I don’t really care. But for the moment, I do find it rather creepy and annoying that people who I’ve said quite clearly that I’m done with and who have in turn told me never to contact them again (um… why would I want to????) can’t stop trying to get the details of my life anyway. It’s like, move on, people. Make your decisions, accept the consequences, and move on. I’m not taking my blog down (or moderating my comments very much) for their sake, but geez… it’s uncomfortably like being stalked.

Anyhow, I didn’t intend to go off on that, but it certainly does get my creep on.

And now, to the shout-out portion of our program:

NaNoWriMo-sters!!!!: This weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) is big-assed NaNo catchup weekend (presuming Small Monster doesn’t decide to enter the world). To my NaNo peeps who’ve been keeping up, I challenge you to write the number of additional words I have to make up before Sunday at midnight between now and the end of the weekend – 14884! (I’m evil, aren’t I?) And for those who are behind, let us all join in solidarity and get caught up, even if we have to add clowns in buttless leather chaps to our stories to get things moving (“Hmmm… how do I integrate that into a historical romance?”).

Hot Blogging Chicks!: To my favorite bloganistas, I will get caught up eventually in reading your fine writing, although if you can convincingly integrate clowns in buttless leather chaps to your ongoing narrative, I will be much more likely to catch up quickly, probably spewing tea onto my monitors. I will also give you extra points, although if one of my monitors shorts out as a result of the tea, I will have to take those points back

God I need sleep. I’m so going to regret posting that last bit later, aren’t I?

ETA: Ok, so there is a German final, but, eh, I can do that at home and make my husband deliver it anyhow once I’m done with it

So I was just about to write a post whining about how the kid is currently making me feel like I’ve been beaten with a stick when I get out of bed in the morning (he’s heavy and I am so large and unwieldy, you know?) when my good friends Lynett and Steve came by unexpectedly to visit – when the house was at its worst, of course! But we went out and had some slushy thingie at a bubble tea place and headed out to the park with their baby (who is incredibly cute!) and I find I just can’t whine properly now

Well, except about how messy the upstairs now is and how very uninclined I am to cause myself back pain by cleaning. Needs to get done, though – they could tell us anything about when and how Small Monster will be born at Monday’s ultrasound and I want to be prepared. Blah!

But to all who’ve been wondering, I’m quite well, only sore and tired, and I’m so ready to have this baby. Yes, I know I’m not due for another four weeks, but he’ll be fully cooked in one, and I’m rather selfishly hoping that at about 37 weeks he thinks the world is a really exciting place to be and comes on out to visit. My abdominal muscles will thank him!

Small Monster can move.

No really. The kid has some serious power in them thar little bones. I’ve never felt him move more in a single day, and I’ve certainly never seen so much of it.

Like today – I had to go in and fill out a bunch of paperwork for the baby at the hospital, and there, as big as you please, my entire belly starts to move as the kid decides to shift his feet somewhere. I saw it before I really felt it, actually, which is hilarious, and this went on for some time. Usually if he’s going to do some moving, he does it for a minute or so and quits, but he’s been going on all day. He’s strong enough that sometimes it even feels sort of creepy, but I’ll take moving and a little creepy over too quiet any day

Speaking of today’s mounds of paperwork… I filled out a birth certificate/social security card application for my son today. Um, yeah, read that one again. Right now, in some file waiting to be submitted to the State of Colorado upon his birth, is the information for his birth… certificate. Like, including his name. You know that super-secret name? Yeah. It’s down there on a form in all of its too-long-for-American-birth-certificates glory. (Hint: It is not “Small Monster Grothoff”. Also not “Ghengis”, though the Baby Business class leader did fortunately inform us that the State of Colorado would legally allow us to name our children “Oprah Winfrey” or “George Bush” if we liked. I decided to pass this time…)

So now the hospital knows what all of our birth preferences are, that we will hang them if they give the kid a bottle or circumsize him, that my husband is an evil professor, and that I don’t foresee using aromatherapy services during my labor. Yippee! In return, they told me how to ensure that the hospital denies my existence if anyone calls to see if we’re there. Given the recent drama, we’re going for this option – I seriously don’t want a weepy self-concerned guilt call from the peanut gallery after I’ve just pushed out a 10 pound kid from my naughty bits, or worse, have just been cut open, so I apologize to friends and other family if this makes things more difficult than would otherwise be convenient. That said, if you’re a close personal friend/family member and you want a call when the baby is born (or are one of our crew in town and plan to visit in the hospital), let us know and we’ll work out a way to communicate outside of communicating with the hospital directly – they will refuse any knowledge of us as patients, including deliveries, so they’re pretty serious about this stuff. Thank God.

Anyhow. There was at least something useful today

Still behind on NaNo, but getting caught up. I’d get further caught up, but the bearded guy says it’s bedtime, and I hate missing out on my nightly snuggle. Goodnight, Internets… until tomorrow!

So far, if you’ve been looking at my word counts, you’ll see that I officially have bupkus to show. That’s not entirely accurate – I did write some today, but haven’t posted the word count yet because I want to get some more in before I go to sleep. I admit that I didn’t even start writing today until I found a LaTeX fiction class I like for typesetting instead of using Microsoft Word like I have in the past. If you’re not a geek, LaTeX is a typesetting language which produces beautiful documents – click here for more information. The beauty of it is that if I later want to make it look like a finished book, I can just switch the class I’m using and tweak some things. I still swear you could write a bogus paper on, say, flatulence, and if typeset it with LaTeX and submitted it to the right conferences (in the sense of “the wrong conferences”, if you know what I mean), it would be accepted simply because it looks like a published paper.

Yes, I’m a geek. Silly things make me happy. I’m not recommending this to anyone

I went to LaTeX this year because I like my writing to look pretty on top of whatever content it provides (I find it to be good motivation), and I already know how to use it (it’s got a learning curve, but is heavily used in scientific conferences and journals with which I have some experience), so when I found there were a bunch of classes/styles for doing novel manuscripts, I decided it was a fun challenge for this year. (N.B.: For reference, I’m using sffms, specifically with the pretty non-submission option (see this example for a glimpse at what it looks like), and you can sue me if you don’t like it… after so many years in CS, I like to be able to use my skillz whenever possible </brag>)

Also, like all good NaNos, I like to procrastinate, and this was a good way to do so. It works like a charm now, though, so I guess I have to write the thing after all…

I’ll be catching up tomorrow after I do the whole world of hospital preregistration in the morning (aaaaack!). I had to do this catching up thing a lot with the last NaNo I really participated in as well because I was working and commuting for an obscene number of hours a day. Yesterday, frankly, I was too deep into the heavily-pregnant-brand-of-tired to do anything, let alone write.

So here I am, it’s about midnight, and I’m going to write for an hour or so before I crash. Then, tomorrow, it’s time for hardcore catchup and buffering of extra words for the next time I’m pass-out-on-the-couch tired

(Oh, and btw, congrats to my writing buddy Lizzy, who is a) superawesome, and b) totally keeping on track! Karen and Bridget, let us know how it’s going! )