Pay for Your Human Nature

I am twenty-six years old. I grew up in the wealthy suburbs of New York City. I went to a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. From these three sentences, you can safely assume that the first time I was drunk was long before my 21st birthday. You could also assume that I smoked cloves then cigarettes (more than assume for the latter seeing as I smoked for a couple of years before quitting).

I don't find anything wrong with pointing people towards these facts and assumptions because I don't see myself running for any public or political office. Not to mention, only a dozen people dig into this little diary of mine (it's a journal, damn it!) and they all know these things already. Still, in the last ten years, with the Internet in everyone's pocket attached to a camera, linked to a network of other people, we can safely say good bye to any and all forms of privacy.

I was very drunk on Thursday night. Oh, before I go on, I should also point out that whenever you open your mouth, you're bound to piss someone off with even the most harmless statements. So to my under eighteen audience out there, let me remind you that I'm not in high school, college, or fresh-out. I'm an adult with dental bills, a girlfriend who knows my social security number, and a metro card. As I was saying, I was drunk on Thursday night. And I was rowdy. Not violent and hopefully not obnoxious, just rowdy. I had been sleeping a lot lately and upon seeing some friends for the first time in a few months, the laughs fed the tap which filled the glass that coated my stomach with hops and barely.

But I didn't do anything wrong. In fact, I didn't do anything embarrassing. But if you snapped a picture at just the right moment as I was trying to swallow a pretzel and laugh at the same time, you would have seen a James who looked like a red-in-the-face about-to-vomit mess.

You won't find me on Facebook. Sure, I loved it the first year after College. It was fun to stay in touch with people and post random gobble-dee-gook on their walls. And the picture sharing was easy and cool. But then a twelve year old tried to friend me. And my mom. In the same day. So I untagged everything I could and left Facebook.

Did someone take that picture of me on Thursday night? You can't link it to me on Facebook but if you write my name beneath it, will it appear when you search for James Guimaraes?

We gave up our privacy so that we could all know what's going on at exactly the same time. Better, we gave up our privacy so that we could convince ourselves that we were connected to people in a meaningful way while driving a car, eating McDonalds and listening to the latest album Pitchfork Media told us to. When we all get fired in a month because those assumptions you could've made anyway now have documented evidence to back them up (posted on Facebook, tweeted on Twitter and fed to your pocket via AT&T), I'll ask the world a simple question: was it worth it?