If, like me, you have found yourself flailing, the last 2-3 years in particular, for ways to do something, ANYTHING, that might counteract some tiny measure of social harm with social good, then I will pass along this situation I saw on Twitter from @ChicagoLeah:

For the first tweet, I linked to the tweet itself so you can go directly to the thread on Twitter if you want to; for the second two, I linked to the Amazon wishlist in question.

I found this one especially satisfying because I am now 2 for 2 with college-bound children who are not interested in getting all excited about which bedding sets and which color towels. (I have high hopes for four years from now when getting Elizabeth ready.) Choosing from this wishlist gratified my shopping/choosing/decorating desires without having to involve an eye-rolling child. Plus, I got to choose what MY choice would be, which was fun.

If you want to do this too, make sure you choose the Jill Franklin address when you check out: my Amazon checkout process has been all wonky recently, and while it used to default to the wishlist address, this time it defaulted to mine and I had to specifically choose the one for the wishlist. It would be such a pain to get a bedding set delivered to your own house and then have to figure out what to do next.

While I have you here, let me tell you about a Facebook problem I am having, and maybe you have had to solve this and know how to do it. I have my regular personal Facebook account, but I also have one for Swistle Thistle; I use the Swistle Thistle one mostly so that people can get new posts in their Facebook feed if that’s how they like to follow blogs (we’ve all been adrift since the disappearance of Google Reader). I pretty much never go there or interact there or use it for anything else.

Anyway, apparently it had been too long a time since I paid a visit to that account, and I got locked out. Facebook wants me to confirm my identity before it’ll let me back in, and clearly I should have set up one of those “have a friend verify you” situations, but I DIDN’T, OKAY, FINE, I PROMISE TO DO IT IF I EVER GET BACK IN, and now the only other way is for Facebook to show me photos of my Swistle Thistle friends and I identify them by name. But…like, this is set up as a page account or whatever they call it, and people “like” the page rather than “friending” and so it accepts all follows whether I know the people or not, and in many cases I know people as their online identities and not by their actual names. So I failed the test a couple of times and then it wouldn’t let me take it anymore. There’s no workaround that I can see: no “Hey, actually this is a page account and so of course I don’t know the names of everyone following the account, but that doesn’t mean I’m a scammer.”

Oh, they also say I can fix this by posting a photo of myself?? But how on earth would that confirm my identity, and is there any answer that isn’t disturbing?

I realize this is not a common problem. But if you HAPPEN to know how to get around this, I would so appreciate it. Right now anything I post to the blog won’t show up on the Facebook feed.