Kicking the Habit

My name is L, and I was a Facebook gaming addict.

It was pretty bad. Not to the point of spending small fortunes on play money bad, but...close. We had suffered falling outs in the past, but I'd always come back to that little Flash fantasyland, where you can trick yourself via noise and color into thinking you've accomplished something other than spending time and in some cases money to collect arrangements of pixels to decorate your pixel menagerie.

Seriously, think about it. That's what Farmville, or Frontierville, or CafeWorld, or any of those games are. Pixels. You want to talk about investing in things you can't take with you? You close the tab and it's gone. That Maison you spent two weeks frantically hunting down enough climbing vines and slate tiles for? Doesn't exist. The beehive you have to check every two days or the bees with leave? It's fake. The "achievements" you've earned by doing certain things in a certain order in a crunched time frame? A stream of data waiting to be called up. And the limited edition item you plunked down real money for? You don't have room for it in your pixel menagerie, so I guess it's time to start harvesting pixels on an unforgiving schedule until you have enough game money to expand your pixel square.

It doesn't actually sound that fun, does it?

I know the purpose of things like this is to be an escape for harrowed Facebook users in this world, but really? I found them to be more trouble then they were worth. Heck, I was even carting around the official application on my phone so that I could harvest my fake blackberries while walking to class. I really couldn't stop.

And then? I went out of town for four days and had no Internet. I came home to withered *crops* (That I could un-wither for a small fee!) and overgrown land (That I could clear faster with more energy for a small fee!). It's all quite ingenious.

Except for the fact that this time, I didn't do it. Sure, I tried to pick my games back up once or twice, but it just wasn't worth it. I was going to spend ages trying to work back up to where I was, and then what? A  bigger pixel square?

For some people, I understand, Farmville is no more than a few passing clicks in their day. But not for most of the "friends" I had, who would scour their Facebook feeds all day long to snatch up a choice item in the first ten seconds.

I'm also aware that for most people this is the closet they'll ever get to a cow or a stalk of wheat. And it's on this particular measure that I thank God it doesn't apply to me! In my own little twist of the inescapable fact that we are of dust, and to dust we will return, I am of the soil, and I plan to go back to it someday.

And with dead leaves to be dug into the raised bed, so that next spring I can harvest some actual vegetables?

I've got enough to do without worrying about un-withering fake tomatoes.