But with FB all you really have to do is find the RIGHT profile picture (which is way different than choosing the perfect MySpace photo which had a nice amount of cleavage in it) and try to come up with a witty status statement.
You, stuck home with a cold and bored out of your skull, sign up about a week after you return home from your 20th year high school reunion. Your first week you get over 50 friend requests from people you grew up with and/or saw last week for the first time in 20 years. It turns out, after FB interfaces with your AOL e-mail, that about half the people you regularly exchange e-mail with in the present are also on FB so you send them friend requests. You also get about ten friend requests from people who you have no recollection of whatsoever. You’re excited and just accept everyone (you figure something will jog your memory on those random friends).And you post pictures of your life and husband and friends and cat. And because you’re the kind of person that still HAS pictures of everything carefully stored in photo albums (AND a really nice scanner you haven’t used in a couple years) you scan pictures of plays and dances and homecoming floats and other random stuff from high school. People get a kick out of it. You tag photos and OTHER people tag your photos and some serious reminiscing happens and it is pretty cool.
Then you see you can join a group of the Fraternity you were a little sister for when you were at University. So you do that. And you realize no one has posted any pictures yet. So you pull the scanner back out of the closet, plug it back in and scan all your fraternity photos. Parties, ceremonies, formal events, random hanging out at the house. You get in touch with a bunch of those people and there’s more nostalgic chatting. You get to see what they look like now and what their kids look like. It turns out a bunch of the brothers actually married little sisters so you know the husbands and wives in the pictures. Everyone has kids.
During all this people have been unrelentingly sending you virtual hugs, plants, drinks, blow jobs (well, practically) you get winked at and hugged. People want you to be a virtual pirate and vampire and to know what 80’s movie best describes you. After about a week of trying to keep up with this (okay they sent me a plant so now I send them a plant and then they sent me another plant) You let these requests and updates build and stack up until you happily discover the “Ignore all” button because you just really aren’t in the mood to constantly keep giving virtual plants (and creepy little plant-girls) to people even if, somehow, if you give enough of them some rainforest somewhere gets saved. You don’t want a virtual beer, you want a real one.
The first warning tremor that FB is not all cute pictures and happy memories occurs when you’re at home visiting your dad and attend church with him. On your way out the door you shake your minister’s hand and tell him how happy you were to see his daughter’s last FB update about how, after surgery, she is now totally cancer free. You say that is the best status update EVER and he agrees. And then he says something to the effect of how you still need to connect on FB. And you nod and smile and forget about it. Until you get back home and there, from your minister, is a friendship request. You stare at it. You’re already friends with his son (whose unofficial project your senior year of high school was to destroy as much of your life as possible and study the psychological effects) and his daughter (who has always been nice) and you think “there are pictures of me and my friends getting drunk with my friends… I can’t have my minister looking at my slut-o-ween pictures.” And then you remember that he always kind of thought you were a vapid slut anyway and give up and hit “accept”.
People suggest friends to you… you recognize about half of them. "People You Might Know" has some really interesting ideas. You do your first culling of people that, after a couple of months, you still have no idea who they are. Occasionally people (like your kidnapper ex-boyfriend from high school and psycho ex-roommate from college) send you friend requests. You are please that you can not only deny them but also BLOCK them so they can’t see you or any of your online activity.
Then, the week before the election, it starts getting political. This is fascinating. You are surprised by some of the people who so fervently want McCain to win. You immediately delete anyone who is openly for Prop 8. You get excited when a guy from high school posts a clip of himself being interviewed on the national news about why he was volunteering to help elect Obama. You hit the delete key really hard on the women who posts an entire video on the evils of partial birth abortion (the next day she sends you a friend request which you deny) On election day you see some people have given up their status statement to make a pitch for McCain. You figure out how to make your status remind everyone to vote for Obama.
Obama wins (yay) and the next day there are grumblings and statements like,
“Well so much for the government not taking ALL our money, better spend it now guys” and “We need to pray to figure out why Jesus let this happen.” So you delete those people too.
One morning an official status update (when you modify some of your core data it automatically announces it to everyone) says “Dude’s relationship status has changed from married to it’s complicated and it seems rather odd to announce to 134 random people you’re “friends” with online that your marriage is in trouble. Dude’s status updates start to include things like “Dude is mourning the destruction of his marriage” and “Dude is pondering the meaning of wife.” You barely knew Dude in high school so while you feel bad he’s going through a rough patch (made worse by the fact that interspersed between these statements he is uploading new pictures of his kids) you can’t really comment. What would you say?” “I never actually talked to you in the 6 years we went to school together but I’m really sorry your marriage fell apart.” So you read other people’s comments to him and think, again, how weird FB is. One morning you wake up and realized that he had tagged a couple people in one of your albums. At 3:06 in the morning. This, more than anything, makes you realize what a mess he must be if he’s going through your pictures in the middle of the night.
It slowly dawns on you, as people’s comments and responses pop up on your page that people are using FB to actually REALLY reconnect with people. Trading e-mail, getting on the phone. Making plans to see each other after all these years. Several people are trying to help Dude cope with his impending divorce. Where everyone can read it. You realize you have no desire to do any of that and that, just like you had no real interest in attending your high school reunion, you have no interest in actually talking to most of your “friends.” Lurking and checking out photos is fun but you have no desire to really talk to any of these people. Once an aloof antisocial bitch, always an aloof antisocial bitch.
Then Party Boy pops up from your experimental phase in college. He’s one of the few people you’d actually wondered about and you’re happy to "connect" with him. You spend an hour catching up on the phone. You find out that Party Boy turned into Addict Boy for several years before finally becoming Sober Boy. You, of course, have some pictures of those adventurous times as well and so you scan and upload them. You decide to be nice and unblock your ex (not the kidnapper one from high school, the one that broke your heart in college) who actually sent you a friend request about 3 minutes after you signed up for FB (but you’d denied and blocked him) and send him a short message that you’re going to be uploading pictures that include him and that this isn’t a friend request, because you are not friends, but a heads up and by the way Party Boy is on FB now and he should look him up.
You log back on a few hours later and there are fifteen comments on one photo alone… a picture of a makeshift bar (with a “Closed on account of dunkness” sign taped too it) in a dorm room from a Cinco De Mayo party. Only the first two comments are actually about the photo, the remainder are essentially a conversation (between Party Boy and his college roommate) about a trip to a Dead show to buy drugs and how funny it was that whoever it was that was driving didn’t know how to drive stick. You think “Oh well, I guess I never really wanted to get another job anyway” but it seems wrong that you’re now going to be disqualified over some great drug adventure you weren’t even ON and hadn’t heard about until now. Old Friend tells you that you can delete comments, which is the best news you’ve had all day. You delete all the comments and then, just to be safe, the picture that inspired them. You hope, that since no people were in the picture and it therefore wasn’t tagged, that it is truly gone.
Unfortunately Old Friend also tells you that he’d never seen those pictures before and wants to know why he wasn’t invited to the Cinco de Mayo party. Or on that trip to Disneyland. You of course have no idea. All you remember from that party was that drinking tequila before noon that day was about one of the worst decisions you made during college. All you really remember is the headache. All you remember about the trip to Disneyland is meeting the heartbreaker ex and learning that love at first sight did actually exist. You have no idea who put together the guest list or organized the trip.
Heartbreaker ex writes back wanting to know WHY you can’t be friends, and you realize that, thanks to FB, you’ve now re-opened a door you had carefully nailed shut for a reason. You send an e-mail to your ex explaining ONE MORE TIME why you aren’t friends. He, of course, tells you you’re just being silly. You remember WHY you stopped talking to him in the first place.
So now here you are, mad at an ex-boyfriend who you haven’t actually laid eyes on in almost 20 years. That you have been happily married for 12 of those years doesn’t mitigate how freaking irritated you are. One of your best friends is upset about party he wasn’t invited to 20 years ago. People you don’t even remember because it WAS 20 years ago are leaving comments that would cause any future employer nosing about to toss your resume in the round file, and the best part? Your MINISTER can see all of it.
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