Ode to Insta

Social media has never really been my jam.

I never was one of those addicts, the kind who lived or died by the number of likes on a post on Facebook. To me, all that stuff was work. Literally. When I wrote for the newspaper, we had to join Facebook, Twitter, all the things, because we were supposed to promote ourselves, our stories and the paper. So, I’ve just always thought of it all as work.

Except for Instagram.

I adore IG.

Actually, I’m pretty sure I love it.

I know it’s still an offshoot of Facebook and so I should hate it, but it’s such a happier, gentler social media. I’m mesmerized by the food-making and hair-cutting and hair-coloring videos. Don’t even get me started on the clips of chubby, happy puppies romping and just doing their cute canine thing.

You’ll find very little polarizing politics and lots of pretty pictures with minimal text. At least, that’s what I tend to look for.

I follow my favorite stores and lots of different foodie accounts. If you have a funny IG name (“coolshitithrifted”), I’ll most certainly follow you back.

I’m drawn to the do-gooders, like Tex n’ Dex, a now defunct account that followed the adventures of a pack of Lab mix puppies at a Serbian dog sanctuary. The account dissolved for a good reason — all the little “potatoes” as they were called, got adopted.

I love Feed My Seoul, which is a Korean food truck in Cali, even though I’ve never eaten there purely because the wizard behind the account is a sassy, badass momtrepreneur — who also happens to be super complimentary about my shoe posts.

I keep tabs on Amy Schumer and Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jenny Lawson aka The Bloggess, a goddess author and my hero who not only posts the funniest videos of her cats and dog disrupting her writing process but incredibly poignant photos of her, with this freaky device attached to her head, as she receives transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, a treatment for depression. It’s raw and heart-tugging. And real.