Facebook is eating my brain, and I don't seem to care

This past week, I joined FarmVille on Facebook. May God have mercy on my soul.

For those who don't know, FarmVille is a Facebook app that lets you grow pretend crops, sell them for pretend money, and do favors and send gifts to your real friends, who are also busy in the growing of fake food, milking fake cows, etc.

I had no choice in the matter whatsoever. Last Sunday, my wife told me "I don't care if you play it or not, but you have to join FarmVille so that I can get a bigger farm."

Now, I love my wife, and live to help her anytime I can without movement or labor being involved. So I signed onto my Facebook profile, and accepted her Farmville friend requests I'd been ignoring for the past 4 months. I planted my first crop (soybeans and strawberries, I think), and walked away.

Now, here I am, one week later, waiting to harvest a rice crop that takes up most of my arable land, and plotting my days around when I have be available to harvest crops. It is the nature of this insidious little game that you can always get a bigger harvest, or more stuff. Seemingly, the game only takes 5 or 10 minutes of your time. Seven or eight times a day. Or more. And because the game is so addictive, you don't really care.

I've already got my exit strategy in place for when I inevitably get tired of feeding make-believe people. One day, I will sell all my animals, leave my land fallow, and put up a sign telling any visitors that I have gone away to read and play in the sunshine — another abandoned virtual farm on the vast digital landscape.

And I think I should do it soon.

Unless, of course, I make level ten. I've always wanted my own cranberry bog.