What the F? I’m gone for spring break for five days and Facebook is completely different? Just in case I wasn’t already having enough trouble keeping track of people’s birthdays, it goes ahead and moves the few buttons left that I knew how to use without even giving me fair warning. It took me a good 20 minutes of stalking to figure out that people were updating their Facebook statuses rather than writing all over their own walls. It would be one thing if these changes had some useful function for me — like if they were to add a “Remove Unsightly Pimple in Default Pic” button — that’s something I could understand. But, with these seemingly arbitrary and certainly confusing changes, I can’t help but wonder: Why, Mark Zuckerberg? Why?

In the case of Facebook vs. College Students Everywhere, its first offense seems to be one of the more offensive: educating us. I have spent several recent columns discussing the merits of stupidity and oblivion as we go through our college days, and instead, Facebook fills our heads with — as if it wasn’t hard enough to avoid just by sleeping through class — knowledge. Because of Facebook, you pretty much learn everything you never wanted to learn about everyone you never wanted to learn anything about, including yourself. For example, though I am made constantly aware of how ungraceful I am by my constant toe-stubbing and unexplained bruises, I genuinely believed that when I get drunk, I am a decent dancer. That is, until my friend posted a video of me from spring break fist-bumping the air to a beat that is noticeably different from that of the song and wildly yelling nonsense words like that crazy guy from The Goonies. Did I need to know this about myself? No. Did I want to know this about myself? No. Will I ever be able to dance again without that Chewbacca-yell echoing in my head? Clearly ... no. Thanks a lot, Newsfeed.

Another problem with Facebook is that the notifications basically take away all of the elements of spontaneity and surprise in our lives. Honestly, I really should know my friends’ birthdays without having to have Facebook tell me. Now, thanks to Facebook telling everyone when your birthday is, you can no longer use people remembering your birthday as a measure of how much they care about you. It’s like there’s no point to birthdays at all! And the notifications also interfere in what could be wonderful surprises in your life. I mean, without the incessant Facebook messages, I would never have known that DJ White Heat was bringin’ the heat to the Green Cafe afterhours this week, and seeing him DJ next to the paninis could have been an unexpected hilarity.

I have also noticed that Facebook has a vacuum-like ability to suck in anyone within a typing distance from a computer. This may or may not just be me here, but even when I am trying to go to another website, like, say, campusfood.com, my fingers can't seem to resist typing www.facebook.com. But then, once I get there, I forget that I was hungry, and I'm absorbed in stalking people I haven’t spoken to since high school. And before I know it, I’m looking at my ex’s profile hating myself, rather than enjoying a nice delivery of Apollo’s sesame chicken.

Apart from this irreparable damage to my self-esteem and dietary needs, I also blame Facebook for several destructive effects it has had on my entire generation. For one thing, what little romance was left in our society since the death of chivalry has officially been obliterated by Facebook. I don’t know what jerk decided that a heart-shaped icon sent over Facebook is an acceptable Valentine’s Day gift, and as far as I’m concerned, labeling your relationship as “complicated” for all the world to see can serve no purpose other than to further complicate things. Facebook has legitimized — and even capitalized on — all of our generation’s already alarming substitutes for intimacy. Pretty soon we’ll all be reclusive hermits sitting around poking each other. And no, that’s not supposed to sound fun.

Of course, all of the effects of these problems could be avoided by not going on Facebook. But, can you actually not look at Facebook? Can you really? As long as we’re being honest, my real problem with Facebook is that I love it so much that I know that I’ll never want to live without it. It’s like a drug except for that unlike heroin or crystal meth, my gym teacher never told me that if I did it I would get AIDS and my arm would fall off. I am unequipped with the fear necessary to resist succumbing to Facebook’s addictive powers, and I know I’m not alone here.

Think back to five years ago, back when we didn’t know about wallposts and album titles. The closest we came to stalking was checking people’s away messages, and even that felt invasive. Now, we’ve completely accepted that Facebook, with all of its problems, is a fixture in our lives. Even if we could get out of it now, I don’t think that I’d even want to. I only hope that the next time Mark Zuckerberg pulls a fast one on me, it doesn’t keep me from enjoying my favorite addiction.