Wherein I turn a 53-word Facebook status update into a fully realized 524-word essay full of important insights.

As I searched for good and important subjects for this blog, I discovered a fertile source of material that has, to date, been mostly unexplored by serious writers: my recent Facebook status updates.

For example, yesterday I posted the following:

I got really upset today when I heard that Americans drink so many bottled waters every year that the bottles, when laid end to end, would stretch around the world 100 times. It mostly bothered me that we don’t live on a bigger planet so people couldn’t make this kind of stupid comparison.

After I deftly crafted those two sentences, I copied and pasted them into that long and thin “What’s on your mind” rectangle and pressed “share.” I then sat back and waited for the “LOLs” and smiley face icons to appear.

I was quite disappointed.

Only one person responded, my BcFF (best childhood friend forever) and she said this:

Check out the artist Chris Jordan...similar topics and some really interesting work.

I did check out the artist Chris Jordan. His work is critical of American consumerism. I now think that my BcFF didn’t read the second sentence of my post. That suspicion and the fact that—aside from the aforementioned single ill-conceived response—my post so far remains bereft of responses, I feel I need to develop this theme somewhat further and, as I sit here thinking about it, this will naturally lead to a whole series of blogs based on my misunderstood, or overlooked, cleverly worded Facebook status updates.

However, let me set my introductory comments aside for a moment and explain this specific, hilarious status update.

You see, the circumference of the earth is almost 24,902 miles. The water bottle statement implies that a train made from our plastic bottles would stretch for 2,490,200 miles. As a side note, I might mention that I think the original statement would have been even better had they used the other old standby impressive distance comparison: “to the moon and back.”

The one-way distance to the moon is 238,857 miles, so they could have said that if laid end-to-end, we use enough plastic water bottles in a year to stretch from the moon and back more than five times. Personally I prefer the “moon and back” comparison because it always reminds me of Tom Hanks’ heroics in, “Apollo 13.”

Even more than that however, I am generally tired of these types of comparisons and truly wished we lived on a planet such as Jupiter. The circumference of Jupiter at 279,118 miles is, interestingly enough, even further than the distance between the earth and the moon. So, if we lived on Jupiter I could actually turn this statement against the environmentalists and say something like, “You know, if stretched end to end, all the plastic water bottles we use in a year wouldn’t even stretch around Jupiter 10 times!”

That would be telling them!

However, if you paid any attention at all in your high school science classes, you’ve probably already picked up on an even more salient fact: there is virtually no water on Jupiter, therefore no water bottles.

I rest my case.