why i hate facebook...and november plus some sunday enlightenment

November is a glorious, yet awful month.  To quote something I saw on tumblr, November is the Thursday of the year.  You just want it over so you can get to the good stuff.  November does have Thanksgiving, which does involve cranberry sauce, so it's not all bad.  However, there is one thing that just will always drive me crazy about November until the end of time (or at least until facebook goes the way of myspace)....

The gratitude posts.  

**DISCLAIMER** There are a select group of people who do these and I find them hilarious and amazing I AM LOOKING AT YOU AUTUMN NEVADA WILKINS!  Keep that crap up, because you're hilarious and we're related.  So how could you not be hilarious and awesome.

I see the beauty in expressing what you're grateful for.  I think it is important to be grateful.  However, naming things every single day just gets very....lame.  At the beginning of the month, people are coming up with amazingly profound reasons to be grateful in their lives.  And then by Thanksgiving, they start getting thankful for incredibly obscure things in their lives.  It's not the fact that people are expressing their gratitude all over facebook, it is the fact that as a culture we have dedicated one entire month to telling people how much we're grateful for things in our lives, then November ends and the usual facebook rants begin again.

After November ends we all go back to complaining about the things we hate in our lives.  My news feed is suddenly bombarded once again with pro-government/anti-government propaganda, complaints about significant others and the unavoidable articles about how EVERYTHING in the universe is going to kill you and your children.  To me, this attitude about gratitude is just wrong.

Gratitude should something you feel every second of every day.  Gratitude should not be something you have to work at.  As far as I'm concerned, there are THOUSAND upon THOUSANDS of things I see every day that I feel gratitude for.  And, no, I don't write about them on facebook everyday.  Heck, I barely blog about them all that often.  Because I see them and feel them in my heart.

Gratitude isn't posting things on facebook.  Gratitude is about seeing all of the amazing and beautiful things around us and just being...happy.  So, let's be happy year round, and not just during November when social structure tells us we should.

Also, this video is beautiful.  The Mimi Foundation sought to take Cancer patients and give them makeovers so they would be able to truly have a moment of carefree-ness.  It's quite beautiful.  Life is just grand, isn't is?