Facebook?

Facebook or no Facebook?

I quit facebook not quite a year ago. Lots of people sent hostility my way and told me I was a fool for leaving Facebook--often asking why on earth I would delete my account. Well here now for your reading pleasure is the whole sordid affair with no detail left omitted, no matter how scandalous (it's not actually scandalous at all and is probably just boring).

One day I was pondering why I never seem to have a girlfriend and did some quick figuring. I had been on Facebook for about two years and it had been just over two years since I was with a girl in any sense of that incredibly vague term. Obviously there was a correlation: having Facebook corresponded to straight up and consistent rejection, but was it a causal relationship or just a coincidence? There was only one way to find out and that was deleting my account. Besides, I figured, it makes me more mysterious. Let's say some girl likes me, bear with me here, and looks to see if I'm on Facebook but I'm not and it makes me something of an enigma. If this hypothetical girl had the option of looking at my profile then she could figure out that she's not interested without ever having to spend additional time getting to know me, but if I'm not on Facebook then maybe I can trick her into some makeout time. That's how the reasoning went.

Well here we are now, almost a year later and yes, the line of reasoning from that last paragraph is absurd. But wait, I thought, my other obviously false and irrelevant theory of girlfriend correlation is hair length. I've tried short hair, long hair, and a little farther in the past, no hair. Again, there isn't any actual causal relationship between the length of my hair and how attracted girls are to me (even though there should be since when I have long hair I look really good), but I realized I had been looking at this too narrowly. I should be trying combinations of hair length and Facebook status. I've already tried short hair + no facebook, long hair + no facebook, no hair + no facebook, short hair + facebook, and long hair + facebook; I never, however, tried no hair and facebook. So that was the project: shaving my head and signing up for facebook.

Upon shaving my head I decided that I look like a Conan O'Brien If They Mated between Mr. Clean and David Draiman, though on closer inspection I look more like just Mr. Clean. Decide for yourself.

So far this experiment has been a complete failure. Apparently women are attracted to Mr. Clean the same way I'm attracted to Mrs. Butterworth: not at all. In hindsight, this fact does not seem startling in the least, although I'm actually kind of surprised by how good I look with the shaved head pose when I'm not wearing an ill-fitting white tee shirt, standing in front of a purple door, and pushing my biceps out with my hands to make them look bigger. (Purple door explained: we took the picture in my apartment and if I stood in front of any of our walls, which are all white, I wouldn't be visible in the picture so I had to stand in front of our door, which is purple.) My misplaced confidence isn't that surprising because I generally think that I look good with whatever pose I adopt, no matter how shitty and ridiculous looking. See the beard I had last summer...