Elizabeth Weintraub and Led Zeppelin Do Facebook With Downton Abbey

Admitting outloud in public that I don’t much like Facebook is like the day I tore my Led Zeppelin album off the turntable in the middle of a party and spun it like a Frisbee into the street. All of my party guests stopped flicking the Bic to light whatever they were smoking and stared at me with dropped jaws. Their gazes traveled from the opened front door to my defiant face and back. They were astonished.

That was a sacrilegious act. But you know what? There are only so many times that a reasonable person can listen to Stairway to Heaven before her mind begins to decay. And for crying out loud, it was my album. I tried pleading with my guests to play something else but nobody was listening. You would have thought I was begging for the Bee Gees when I really wanted to jam to Janis Joplin. But the only way to get Janis Joplin on the turntable was to get rid of Led Zeppelin. So, out the door with it. Imagine the guy driving down Balboa Boulevard on the Newport Beach Peninsula who suddenly spots a 33 LP spinning toward his windshield. See, we just didn’t think back then.

That was BF, before Facebook. With Facebook, you really don’t ever have to think again. You just click. I have all these people on my personal page, and I don’t know where they came from or who they are, so I’ve stopped accepting new friends. Because these people are not my friends. How can they be a friend if I don’t know them? Even some of the people I call my friends whom I do know I don’t particularly like. Yet, I have all of these people on my page, and they all submit crap that I can click through if I’m completely bored.

I started a business page on Facebook, too. Because I was told that I had to do it if I wanted to stay socially relevant. After trying to upload a few photos and making a mess out of it, I have given up. Just leave me to uploading photographs of homes I list in Sacramento to MLS and other websites such as Zillow and Trulia and let me be content with that. Let me blog. Let me write for About.com about homebuying. Let me send my new listings and my personal blog to Facebook for you. Let me send a Tweet every day to Twitter.com. You want to chat with me, you can pick up the phone or send me an email or a text message. I am simply unwilling to communicate with you through Facebook. If that’s blasphemous to you, I have no regrets. You can go listen to Barry Manilow. You should go “like” the Facebook page for Led Zeppelin.

That’s what you get from a Sacramento real estate agent who would throw away Led Zeppelin. However, there is one exception. That’s when some clever soul creates a Facebook parody, and it’s so accurate that you can’t stop laughing. If you have been glued to Season 3 of Downton Abbey, I suggest you check out this website If Downton Abbey Took Place on Facebook. You can thank me later.