You Just Don’t Need To Know That

We have a pretty open and honest community here on the internet.

I’ve shared a lot of personal information. Not personal, stalker-type information, but things that don’t just get brought up in casual conversation, like my childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, a story about the first boy I ever loved, and the fact that when I lock/unlock a door with a key, I still have to recite, “Righty, tighty. Lefty, loosey.” And then I giggle because that sounds really dirty.

We, and I say we and really mean me, may even be prone to oversharing. (Shocker!) Anonymity is the mother of all confessions, unless you’re Lindsay Lohan and then no one really cares what you do anyway.

Oversharing is really a matter of audience approval. I, as a connessieur of gossip, will accept just about any piece of juicy information as long as it is being told to me at the right time. (Restaurants, Starbucks, and the living room of my parents’ house while my dad is just down the hall being examples of times when I don’t want to hear about your personal life unless we are dicussing your financial future, which always sounds sophisticated even if your prospects are bleak.) I call it “research.”

There is plenty more that I am willing to share with you. I’m writing a post about my struggles with food. There will come a day when my boyfriend/husband/robotic companion will want a dog, and I will be forced to reconcile my conflicting feelings about the canine species. I actually really love Justin Bieber.

But some things are private, yo.

Like my preferred brand of ketchup.

You don’t need to know that.

A certain brand of ketchup, mass marketed around the country and probably the first thing you even think of when you think ketchup (which, let’s be honest, probably happens more than you’d like to admit), wants you/me to “like” them on Facebook so that the whole world can see that I support their endeavors to rule the condiment world. Is it some kind of condiment war? Do condiments have popularity contests? What if I go to a restaurant that serves another type of ketchup? Am I then betraying my ketchup’s trust?

(Side note: Orginally, that sentence ended with an image of ketchup “smothering my burger,” which was so dirty that I had to remove it from its original context but still share it with you all because I have a mind that lives, almost permanently, in the gutter. What a fall from innocence it has been…)

I should not have such loyalty issues about ketchup. In fact, “loyalty” and “ketchup” should probably never be in the same sentence again.

This is not to say that ketchup is mundane. In fact, when you assume that ketchup is mundane, it opens up an entirely new opportunity to make a fool of yourself, as one certain person who shall not be named did while she was travelling in South Africa and basically managed to ruin her lunch by spilling ketchup all over everything because South African ketchup does not have any preservatives and so is much runnier than American ketchup. The massacre of cardiovascular disease-inducing food was a legend surely not to be forgotten in that mall. Also, they make their milkshakes out of goat’s milk. And they are disgusting.

Rather, some things are personal. Some things deserve to be held dear. Some things are so rooted in tradition and esteem and pride that they need not be paraded around like Molly Ringwald’s underwear.

Unless they give out coupons. Then I’m all over it.