feed nosiness

I’ve been up baking bread, Finnish Christmas pastries and toffee, and now it’s already tomorrow and I still have Karelian pierogis, vegetarian meatballs and chocolate caramel covered stuff to do. Somehow, Christmas always manages to come as a surprise, and everything has to be done in the last minute.

I was supposed to go to sleep, and continue the cooking tomorrow morning, but when I was going to shut down my computer, I got stuck in front of my Facebook feed. As so many times before.

Lots of Christmas wishes. My friend Ida gave birth to a son two days ago on a mattress in front of the Christmas tree in their living room (only 15 hours after I visited them, had fika and gave Ida the knitted baby hat that I’d made), everyone is well and happy. One couldn’t wish for a better Christmas gift. I guess. Julius’ club in Münich seems to have had some kind of photo uploading session, and being a DJ, he’s on many of them. It annoys me how cool and handsome he is. Luis from Lima seems to have been to a wedding. Abbie has left Ecuador for Christmas in Minneapolis. Katarina and Jonas and Livija and Mattias and Carro were at the anti-racist demonstrations in Kärrtorp yesterday. So was I, but of the above, I only ran into Jonas.

It feels weird, being able to keep track of people like this. Disconnected, somehow. Scary. Stalkerish. And nice at the same time, too. Especially since most of them I wouldn’t be able to contact without Facebook. Of course I don’t know, but I think that’s what happened with all the on-the-road-friends that backpackers made before Internet and social media. They’d disappear, just be vague memories and blurry faces in photos forgotten in an album in a box stacked away in the attic.

I rarely put up anything on my Facebook page that then can end up on other people’s feeds. Except for the occasional photos that others upload (which I don’t mind at all), I think I’m pretty anonymous on Facebook. No possibilities for keeping track of me there.

However. I have this blog. On Saturday, four people viewed it 99 times. Someone must have been having a slow day and reading through it all. Today, seven people viewed it 40 times. That’s a lot more traffic than what it usually gets. I’m curious. Who are these people, reading stuff from my trip to Canada two years ago? I write stuff here with the feeling that no one really reads it now that I’m not travelling, and mom and dad and my closest friends meet me on a regular basis. I only know of two people that have actually told me that they read it. But maybe I should change that perspective. There obviously are others. 99 views in a day is not an accidental Google search gone astray.

Oh, well. In this digital day and age, I guess this is something that should be embraced, not worried about. Both my late night scrolling down the personal gossip tabloid filled with news about my circle of acquaintances and friends, and the fact that my blog is being comprehensively read by people without me having the faintest idea of who they are. Development is not likely to go back to old ways anytime soon.

Now, I need to sleep. Merry Christmas!