Ooooooh, FACE! A Facebook Status Update Gets the Whatevs
This morning, at 8:57 AM, Rachel Zerwicki did what she always does when she wakes up: Lean over her futon, grab her G4 laptop, and log onto Facebook to check out what all her friends have been doing since she went to bed at midnight. On this Tuesday, Ms. Zerwicki saw that Jonas Ramon, her ex-boyfriend, had updated his status.
And so Ms. Zerwicki decided to do something different: she refused to look at what it said.
“I just know he’s updating his status for my benefit and I refuse to get sucked in,” said Ms. Zerwicki, a 29-year-old handbag designer in Cobble Hill, as she glanced surreptitiously at the screen. “It’s like, I know he has 347 friends, and we haven’t spoken since we graduated from college 8 years ago, but still: I know that he’s just trying to rub it in that I’m single and childless and $80,000 in debt from the PhD program I dropped out of. He’s always updating his status. Or adding new pictures of himself and his wife—the director of a nonprofit for kids with cancer and a yoga teacher on the side—snowboarding in Vail. Or of him with his two blonde, curly-haired kids eating mussels on the beach and smiling. It’s like, I am 100% positive he’s just adding all this stuff to mess with my mind. It’s so typical.”
To be sure, Ms. Zerwicki is not the first person to ignore annoying, inane status updates like one she saw this morning from her friend Dany Rotundo that said “Dany Rotundo is.” But as someone who is still hung up on her ex—who isn’t really even her ex but a guy she sometimes slept with in college who told her repeatedly he didn’t want to date her—she is taking an extra step: Studiously avoiding her ex’s status updates and profile page, except when it is late at night and her boyfriend is asleep and she is drunk. Which is pretty often.
