Each year around this time, my shoulders start to tense up every time I open Facebook. This wouldn't be such a problem except that a lot of my work involves needing to open Facebook.

Protip: Think long and hard before you end up in a job that involves needing to be on Facebook. It's too late for me, but some of you can still save yourselves.

There's a reason for my late-spring social media cringe — or rather, there are two of them, and I share them today knowing that by doing so I will likely burn bridges, lose friendships, and trigger more unsubscribes than this week's pee-pants newsletter*, but I am bound by the truth, so I must unburden myself.

*One. I lost one subscriber over the pee-pants meme email. I'll live.

OK, ready to find out what makes this month my least favorite month on social media? Here we go. There's this little beauty of a meme:

and this precious gem of a holiday:

Look, I have nothing against *NSYNC. I was a little bit too old to be into them when they first hit it big, but then, during spring break of my junior year of college, the video for "Bye Bye Bye" came out while my friend Draper and I were staying at our other friend's apartment in the California desert and we watched the "Making the Video" episode, like — I don't know how many times because we were also drinking a lot of amaretto sours, but I know that the room went STONE COLD SILENT for a moment when JT dropped out of that elevator shaft and did that little laugh — I know you know the one, girls and gays — and then we immediately fell in love extremely hard and permanently. I admit with no shame that there is *NSYNC downloaded to my driving-in-the-car playlist.

For those of you who are either too young or too old or too punk rock to follow mainstream pop memes, the second single off the "No Strings Attached" album was a song called "It's Gonna Be Me." I do assume that even if you're not familiar with the song, unless you've been living under the world's largest rock for the past two decades, you have at least one time heard the singing voice of Justin Timberlake, who sang lead vocals on "It's Gonna Be Me," and who drew the word "me" out into a digitized, elongated "may."

That was a much longer backstory than was probably necessary to set up the fact that the last two weeks of April every year, I have to scroll past 475 versions of the meme above (get it? Because after it's April, IT'S GONNA BE MAY?), which is the absolute all-time peak example of the advice about repetition that I recall Ramona Quimby once getting from her father:

"One time is funny. Two times is silly. Three times is a spanking."

How played out is this meme? Here's a solid indicator: Barack Obama tweeted it. In 2014.

Speaking of things that have progressed from clever to mildly amusing to "are we done yet?", let's talk about Star Wars Day. I'm probably going to get hate mail from my nephew, so I feel like I need to say right up front that I am a VERY BIG STAR WARS FAN, just like roughly 97 percent of people born after 1970. I get it, it's cute, "May the fourth be with you," it's how someone with a speech impediment would say the thing that Jedi believers say to one another. But did I miss a memo when it became a bigger national holiday than some actual holidays? (Don't @ me unless you can tell me what memes you shared for Arbor Day last year... or what date Arbor Day even falls on.) Do we really need a special day dedicated to Star Wars, which literally is a Disney property with actual physical theme parks now? It's a $70 billion media franchise, not a secret niche special interest for uber-nerds who have no other outlet to assert their right to enjoy the thing they love. I feel like once a media phenomenon has multimillion-dollar vacation destinations dedicated to it... I don't know, isn't every day Star Wars Day? Yet my whole Facebook feed begins filling up with May the Fourth memes just as the "It's Gonna Be May" memes start to fade away.  

Anyway, every year as April turns into May, I'm way more annoyed by these spanking-worthy memestorms than I probably should be. People like the things they like and I don't need to ruin it for them (unless I feel the need to dedicate an entire newsletter to complaining about it, I guess).

But this year was different.

"It's Gonna Be May" and "May the Fourth Be With You" were still out there this year, but at least in my newsfeed, they were largely overshadowed by the unrelenting tidal wave of armageddon news (and yes, I'm including both the economy and the arrival of murder hornets under that umbrella). I'd say the Star Wars Day posts were down by as much as 50 percent (I will admit that I even participated myself, but only because I read this legitimately funny satirical piece about Star Trek fans choosing to say "Happy Holidays" instead of "May the Fourth Be With You" that deserved to be shared), and "It's Gonna Be May" got an update relevant to the times:

For the record, I would happily go back to being mildly annoyed by Star Wars Day and the *NSYNC meme. It'd be a vast improvement over reading about armed protesters demanding to be let into government offices and security guards being shot to death after asking shoppers to follow mask policies. 

Let's all cross our fingers that this time last year I'm not writing Day 401 of this newsletter, reminiscing about the good old days when we used to meme things besides murder hornets, economic collapse and how to wear face masks.

For now, though, all month long: