Farmville!!!!!

There is a new trend on Facebook which isn't that new or trendy. It's about building a farm. In 2009. I would hate to be a real life farmer. Imagine out and about, 'so what is it you do for a living? ... I'm a farmer!' I'd hate that, probably because I'm snooty and also a snob, and my idea of living isn't in dirty dungarees getting my manicured nails filthy and hiding my perfectly polished toes in rubber wellies. No, I just would never do that. And yet this virtual farm seems to be all the rage right now. It's the in-thing on Facebook. And I also have one, which is shameful, perfect to waste time with. But not something to get addicted to. Buying sheep and harvesting corn isn't my kind of thing. But it's the perfect type of people watching. You get to know a lot by a person's farm. Most have white fencing. Most have animals so orderly that they make me feel sorry for them. They cannot even move. And the ploughing plots are really something. They could be measured by an engineer's callipers and would be deemed as having been placed perfectly one by the other. No waste of space. What is that? Virtual OCD-ing? And as if that weren't enough, what about the obsessive need to check if cows need milking? Would I keep checking a cow's udders in real life? Oh noooooo. The thought itself is harrowing, and no do not kid me into saying it's relaxing. Relaxing is in some Bedouin drinking hot chocolate, smoking with a significant someone else. Relaxing is throwing all my newly acquired shopping possessions onto the carpet and making love to them in my own kind of voyeuristic way. But the best (and worst) thing which has come up lately is the hedging. There are hedges all over the place. Which spells, what exactly? If a virtual farm is on show for all to see, why bother with the hedging? Has Farmville become the 'accepted' place to air out our control issues or what? Then again, must be something I'm missing.