I have a love-hate relationship with facebook! For one, I love that I can keep in touch with people. Everybody I have ever met has touched my life in some way, so it is nice to see what people are doing. I love its chat and I love the photos. It helps me feel like I am not isolated down here (I am not isolated; we are part of a wonderful community).

So why do I hate facebook? It’s not just that I spend too much time keeping in touch with people (for I do), but facebook makes me feel old! I have caught up with past students of mine through facebook. My gorgeous year 7s of 2000 are at uni now, older and wiser, meaning I am older (none-the-wiser). People I went to school with are getting married and having babies. We are all getting older and I am getting older and I am about to turn 31!

Being older is not such a bad thing. I love it that I am maturing and supposedly learning more about the world and becoming wiser. It’s nearly my birthday, that is why I am doing this “oh heck I’m aging” thing. I seem to have done this since my 25th birthday, when I cried my eyes out, wondering what the heck I had achieved in my life (on creating a list, it seemed that I had, indeed, achieved a great deal!).

I read Women’s Weekly every now and then. I recently read an article titled “love the skin you’re in” or something similar. It suggests that we learn to love our freckles, wild hair and big noses. It has a list of 10 things to make you feel more beautiful. It talks about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, and then it goes on to tell you how to conceal those freckles (or even have surgery to remove them), and tame those wild locks, and balance your being so that your nose does not look so big (they don’t use the word ‘big,’ but I know that they mean it!).

What I am trying to point out is that the media is a two-faced sonofabitch that says one thing, means the other, and clouds our judgement over what is true and right. Womens Weekly may say that big noses are all right, but their models don’t have big noses. Facebook makes me feel old, but in reality I am quite young, and we all age the same: day by day. I am young, my nose is not big, and I will focus on the things that make me very happy in the year that I am thirty-one years young!