I'm addicted and it sucks

The short of it is - I'm addicted. Let's start from the beginning...

As the MySpace craze began, I declined to indulge, sure that it was useless, pointless, and just another way for some jerkoff to get your email address and personal information so they could send even more SPAM. I hate MySpace and refused to ever get on board. Then Facebook came along and I learned it was similar to MySpace. I hated it, too, purely by association. However, when my best friend recently signed up for Facebook and then gave me her account info to check it out, I found many of my old high school friends and some people I had thought of but not spoken to in years. I signed up, added in my pictures and connected with a few friends.

Now, my SO has hated MySpace and Facebook right along with me, all this time. We stood firmly together chanting our "We don't need it - we won't have it!" anti-social-networking mantra. So when I broke down and got my Facebook account, it was my dirty little secret that I hid from him. Then the addiction started. My best friend, you remember her from the above paragraph, no? Well, she sent me some horses and a few trees to start my own efarm. I went to my plot of green land and setup my animals and fruit trees, much like the old days when I had plastic farm animals. Ohh, how I LOVED my plastic farm animals! Only now, they are e-animals. And I get to plant e-crops. Every day I send my friend e-animals and e-trees and she in turn sends them to me. We continue to grow e-crops and harvest them, making e-money which enables us to plow more land, plant more crops, and make more money. Then we wondered, 'which if the crops, available to plant, would make us the most money?" That's when the geeking really began. I setup a spreadsheet noting how much the e-seeds cost, how many days till harvest, what our return is and what is the net profit per day that we earned. Surprisingly, the 1 day crops give us the most bang for our bucks. Strawberries and tomatoes, it is!

But the key here is that you have to love your e-farm, and nurture it really. If you wait too long to harvest your crops, they rot in the field and you've lost all of the e-money you previously earned. So while my SO was recovering on the sofa from surgery this weekend, I was logging in and harvesting, plowing, and reseeding my e-crops. Of course, I tried to do this discretely, turning my laptop ever-so-slightly away from SO, as to not alert him to my weakness for creating a Facebook account. And then, out of the corner of my eye, I see him leaning ever-so-slightly to see what's on my computer screen. "Are you playing farm?" he asks. I look at him with annoyance and remark, "whatever!"

The next day my peripheral vision tells me he's watching again as I harvest, plow, plant... harvest, plow, plant.. harvest, plow - well, you get the picture. While I update my spreadsheet to reflect the prices for harvesting fruit trees, he leans in again, looks at my screen and then raises an eyebrow at me. Fine, just admit what you're doing and get it over with - and the verbal vomit began... "Ok, so HERE is how much seeds cost, THIS column shows how many days till harvest, THIS column shows how much they pay me for my crop, and this column shows me what my profits are. Of course, profits are only after you've paid the $20 to plow each crop but really, why can't they let me plow my own plot and save my $20? It's ridiculous - I should be able to save my own seeds too, instead of having to buy theirs which are probably patented, hybrid or some GMO shit, I mean really now!" His only words were, "that sounds like work." Ok, time for honey to hush up while I vicariously live out my homesteading dreams through my efarm because I'm too broke or too chickenshit to really do it on my own (plus I haven't quite convinced HIM that we should live in the country, but I'm working on it, really!)

Meanwhile I hear, "Honey, I had surgery two days ago, and I'm hungry, can you start dinner now?" Sure babe, as soon as I'm done harvesting, plowing and seeding best friends crops, because she's traveling right now and has no access to a computer... And so the addiction continues.