My Name is Araina & I'm Addicted To Social Networking Sites

I gather everyone reading this blog entry has greeted me by saying, "Hi, Araina." ;o) Now that I've stated what the problem is, I need to figure out how I got here and how to control my "addiction". I guess it all started with my unending nosiness. I don't really consider myself to be a nosey person, but I must be since I like to know what "everybody" is doing on a regular basis. It's not like I even care what everyone is doing just knowing is good enough for me. Sad, I know. Anyways, my nosiness then branched out from one social networking site to another, then another. Three places total to satisfy my curiousity to peruse through people's "personal" information that they so eagerly volunteered on the internet. Most of the stuff I read was hilarious from the people making over $250K a year while "between" jobs, to others who had earned bachelor's degrees in less than two years. Just silly things that were undeniably untrue, however, highly entertaining. I could never understand how people were cyber gansters and proud of it. Like any other thing that is so unreal it's laughable, I found great pleasure in reading about the silly things people lied about or, on the other hand, told too much of the truth about. No one needs to know that you've had relentless diarrhea or that you and your kids' father aren't getting along. Why people chose to share such personal information was equally confusing and amusing to me.

Anyways, back to me.

With the variety of things to view on social networking sites, also came many opportunities for me to catch up with old friends, meet new ones, and share a few of my experiences. I was able to see new babies, new beaus, new cars, new houses, the works! But seeing these things weren't enough for me. I needed to visit these sites repeatedly. Repeatedly like every few minutes kind of repeatedly. It became an outlet for me to enjoy the web in a whole new way. Until now. I've found that being addicted to social networking sites has become a bit too much for me. I wake up checking "my" sites, have text messages come to my phone if any activity happens on my profiles, and lastly, before I shut my eyes every night, I have to check my pages. It's such a shame. As I'm sitting here writing this, it's actually very comical to me. True signs of an abuser. Also, in writing this blog entry, I've realized that I've never actually calculated how much time I spend, rather waste, each day on these sites, but I'm definitely sure it's a considerable amount. I have to get a handle on this problem though. I know that if I spent less time on social networking sites, and more time studying for my classes, reading books, or even meditating, I'd be a more calmer, less stressed individual. I think I'm going to make it a goal to limit the times I visit these sites and see if my body won't expire as a result of this change. I'll let you all know how my experiment turns out.

Until next time,

Rain
The FB, Twitter, & MySpace Addict