Giving Up Facebook for Lent

"You're not signing on at all for forty days?" was Jifo's reaction. (Yes, he's back in my life...)

"I almost want to delete my account," I said a few days ago. Selena and I had just stayed up until 3 a.m. on a weeknight playing her ex on the most exciting game of facebook Scrabble I have ever encountered. There was collusion ("I'm setting you up for a triple word - can you form a word with C as the first letter?"), victory ("I can form a 3-letter word with C as the first letter and using a high-point tile!"), anxiety ("But can he add to your word?"), letter-counting ("It depends, do you have the last blank tile?"), high risk and payoff ("I got the blank tile!").

But all our covert ops were for naught. After she set me up for the shot and I slammed the dunk (yeah I don't know sports talk), we got an eery final message from our challenger in the Scrabble Chat box:

Please do not be angry with me.

Since my chat messages got there quicker than her, I read the line aloud to Selena. (Yes, we were on our separate computers, shouting to each other through the wall in our apartment.)

"Oh no," I moaned.

"What does that mean?" she screeched.

An instant later, the red dot on our alerts blinked. He had won the game. With an 81-point word, using all the remaining tiles in his deck.

And I'm going to give this up.

I'm giving up the rematch we immediately started with our unbeatable nemesis, titled "Our Mount Everest." ("But I'm only 5'7"," he protested through the chat box.)

I'm giving up 20-40% of my social contact, in hopes of directing my social life into a personal, or at least phone encounter.

On the bright side, I give up seeing what girls keep writing on Jifo's wall and commenting on photos of him that I've never seen (back off b*tches! talk to your own [rekindled]boyfriends!).

Instead, I run my own time, rather than letting my addictions dictate it. I am also putting on hold my watching of LOST and True Blood internet episodes (no spoiling!), because they are reruns and can be watched addictively in one continuous, eye-straining overnighter. I'll keep up with my ABC and MTV shows, because they only put out one episode a week. (Now that I'm caught up. I kind of stayed up until way too late last night making up for my 3-week Grey's Anatomy lag...sigh.)

Are you also giving up facebook? The Chicago Tribune helps you import your facebook activities into realtime. My favorite is:

Poke people. Actually poke them. Then walk away without saying why you poked them.