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amanda_loddenI'd managed to avoid the whole "post 25 random facts about you" thing largely by only having friends on LiveJournal who refuse to tag other people (and I love each and every one of you for it). Along came Facebook, where I got tagged by two different people.
For the most part, I hate the whole "random facts about me" (mind you, I'm fine with it if you want to post random facts about YOU, just leave me out of it). Do you really care what my favorite color is? It's hardly a defining part of my personality. Plus, it changes based on what the situation is-- colors I like for painting walls are quite different from colors I like to see in my garden, for example.
In a more general sense, I dislike the fake-knowledge that "random facts" feeds. I can rattle off trivial things about dozens of people, but I don't know what their deeply held beliefs are. In some cases, I don't even know what their real name is, because they are people who I interact with online and we both use aliases. (If your first reaction was "*Oh*, online gaming and aliases don't count", I'd like you to tell me what my last name is. If you said "Lodden" you're wrong, and I'd advise you to reconsider what qualifies as an alias.)
For exactly the same reason, I hate wearing nametags at functions. I'm perfectly fine with being called "Hey, you" because of it (and I've been known to write "Hey, you" on my nametag if there's no Nametag Nazi in charge of the tags and pens), but if you want to know what my name is, please come up to me and say "Hi, I'm Tom, and you are?" In other words, have a REAL conversation with me, instead of starting off as though we already know each other.
However, every so often I get one of those "answer these questions about yourself" memes at a time when I'm bored, and it has been known to spark a question from someone about one of my answers. So I opened a new entry in Google notebook and started jotting down things, trying to see if I could come up with 25 of them.
It took about 20 seconds to realize that I was going to have a problem, because of the first 12 things I wrote down, I immediately wanted to expound at length on 9 of them.
So, instead I'm going to 25 posts about things about me. In the interest of not flooding people's friends pages, I plan to spread them out over many days, and I may take week-long or month-long breaks in between. I may quit after getting to #3, if I get bored or sick of it or I run out of things to talk about (Hah! Unlikely) or I get slammed with other things to do.
I'm also going to flatly refuse to tag people and make them write anything, neither a single post of 25 one-line items nor 25 posts. If you think it's fabulous idea and want to do it yourself, do it. Blame me for it, even-- everyone can consider themselves tagged if they want to.
For the most part, I hate the whole "random facts about me" (mind you, I'm fine with it if you want to post random facts about YOU, just leave me out of it). Do you really care what my favorite color is? It's hardly a defining part of my personality. Plus, it changes based on what the situation is-- colors I like for painting walls are quite different from colors I like to see in my garden, for example.
In a more general sense, I dislike the fake-knowledge that "random facts" feeds. I can rattle off trivial things about dozens of people, but I don't know what their deeply held beliefs are. In some cases, I don't even know what their real name is, because they are people who I interact with online and we both use aliases. (If your first reaction was "*Oh*, online gaming and aliases don't count", I'd like you to tell me what my last name is. If you said "Lodden" you're wrong, and I'd advise you to reconsider what qualifies as an alias.)
For exactly the same reason, I hate wearing nametags at functions. I'm perfectly fine with being called "Hey, you" because of it (and I've been known to write "Hey, you" on my nametag if there's no Nametag Nazi in charge of the tags and pens), but if you want to know what my name is, please come up to me and say "Hi, I'm Tom, and you are?" In other words, have a REAL conversation with me, instead of starting off as though we already know each other.
However, every so often I get one of those "answer these questions about yourself" memes at a time when I'm bored, and it has been known to spark a question from someone about one of my answers. So I opened a new entry in Google notebook and started jotting down things, trying to see if I could come up with 25 of them.
It took about 20 seconds to realize that I was going to have a problem, because of the first 12 things I wrote down, I immediately wanted to expound at length on 9 of them.
So, instead I'm going to 25 posts about things about me. In the interest of not flooding people's friends pages, I plan to spread them out over many days, and I may take week-long or month-long breaks in between. I may quit after getting to #3, if I get bored or sick of it or I run out of things to talk about (Hah! Unlikely) or I get slammed with other things to do.
I'm also going to flatly refuse to tag people and make them write anything, neither a single post of 25 one-line items nor 25 posts. If you think it's fabulous idea and want to do it yourself, do it. Blame me for it, even-- everyone can consider themselves tagged if they want to.
