The silent killer

Little 500 has come and gone. I am filled with a combination of bittersweet adieu and a renewed longing for next year that is usually reserved for Dec. 26. The event everyone’s been anticipating since the beginning of the semester has passed.

Yep, our school year is pretty much over.

Except for finals. Sick. Just the thought of being crammed in the library at 3 a.m. amid the aura of stress and the looks of panic from freshman who are realizing that it was not actually a good idea to make Little 500 a month-long celebration makes my skin crawl.

It’s time to get serious, kids.

My proposition: I’m staying off Facebook. I know it sounds trivial, but the new page layout isn’t the only atrocity committed by everyone’s online addiction. According to a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association, college students who use the social network have significantly lower GPAs. Of the 219 students surveyed, those who reported using Facebook had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, while those abstinent ranged from 3.5 to 4.0.

Moreover, Facebook is annihilating our treasured As and Bs, and we don’t even know it; 79 percent of the same students said they saw no link between their Facebook usage and their GPAs. It’s a silent killer.

So I quit my Facebook.

I’m really proud of myself, but it’s been a long 23 hours. How did all my friends survive Little 500? Where did they go? What did they do? I want to see pictures! By hour 10, I was struggling, so I did what I think any reasonable person having trouble giving something up does: I decided to join a support group.

I googled “help quitting Facebook” and found tons of great sites. Firstly, there’s a plethora of anonymous addicts spilling their hearts out on YouTube. Great find.

But my Google search bore more fruit than pure entertainment value. There were many informational sites. I learned that many college students suffer from “Facebook
Addiction Disorder” and that you can take the Facebook Addiction Test, a 10-item questionnaire, online to discover your diagnosis.

Reading through the questions made me especially nervous. “How often do you prefer the excitement of Facebook to intimacy with your partner?” “Oh my gosh!” I thought. “I had no idea other people experienced this too!” Then, “How often do you block out disturbing thoughts about your life with soothing thoughts of the Facebook?”
Cripes! I’m addicted!

I need help! Immediately I clicked on the blue beacon of hope, the one thing that can save me: the “join group” link.

If this Facebook group can’t help me, I don’t know what can. Now I just have to hope and pray it isn’t too late to save this semester’s grade point average.