About Facebook

(Disclaimer: If you are one of my Facebook friends, none of the cynical, condescending, satirical, sarcastic, snarky - but highly amusing - things I'm about to write are about you. Unless they are. But I'll deny it, regardless, so just assume it's not about you, 'K? Cool.)

Sometime last year, I set up a Facebook page. I no longer remember why, but I only had about three friends, because I couldn't figure out how to search for people. Clearly, nobody was searching for me, so I got my feelings hurt and quit. (This is a lifelong pattern. Join something, get overwhelmed or get my feelings hurt, quit. It's always served me well.)

I never could make much sense of Facebook. If I knew these people and wanted to communicate with them, why couldn't we just email? Or maybe Facebook is where you go so you can communicate with pseudo-friends that you don't like quite enough to give them your actual email address. I never figured that part out.

I was massively annoyed with the whole "games, gizmos, gadgets and gifts" aspect of this social networking experience. Really? People who can't send me a damned email consider it a substantive act of friendship to "send" me an imgainary snow globe or bottle of Yoo-Hoo? This furthers our friendship... how?

Tell you what. If you ever suffer catastrophic organ failure, I'll send you an imaginary kidney on Facebook. (If it's your liver, you're totally on your own, because I'm pretty sure even my imaginary liver has cirrhosis.)

So, blah blah blah, I quit Facebook. I had no sooner done this than I started getting email requests from people I actually knew, in reality or online, asking me to join Facebook and be their friend. See, ain't that the way? You start playing hard to get, and you're instantly in high demand. I shunned them all (bwahahahaha). "Gee, no, sorry, tried it and didn't get much out of it, don't really have the time, buh-bye now."

I went off to play with Twitter, because I truly do have profound thoughts of 140 characters or less at least 27 times a day, and I must have a way to announce them to the world, or at least my 114 followers. I did find some other interesting bloggers through Twitter, and have since developed cyber-friendships with them that do not involve any social networking site, so Twitter is still on my list of acceptable online time-wasters.

A lot of the Tweets (hey, gotta know the lingo if you want to run with the Twitterati) mentioned their Facebook pages, and I got thinking that there were a few long-lost friends that I'd never succeeded in tracking down, so I decided to give it another try.

I don't know what has changed since last time, but it was much, much easier to find people I knew, and after only a couple of weeks I have 43 friends, all of whom I actually know in some context, either from school, dog-related activities, or various online lists or groups.


(Note: My Cyber-Friends-I've-Never-Met outnumber people I've known in person by about 2 to 1, which might or might not give you some clue as to my real-world social skills.)

Even though I know all of these people in one way or another, some interesting patterns are emerging. First of all, the people who are most interactive, entertaining, and responsive are... my cyber-friends. Perhaps this is because the reason I know them at all is that we have something significant in common now, as adults.

What's really funny is that the first thing the vast majority of people said when we "connected" on Facebook is, "Oh, my gosh, I am so addicted to Facebook!!!" I can categorically state that if your level of Facebook use qualifies as "addicted," a) you need to check out dictionary.com for the definition of "addicted" and b) we're going to have to come up with some exponentially greater, all-encompassing word to describe my feelings toward books, nicotine, and wine. Most of the time I'm signed on Facebook, only two or three of my friends are signed on, and all but one of them is shown as "idle". Plus, most of these people have status messages that are several days old, if not more. This, people, is not addiction.

(The good news is that I have a very short attention span. While I've been back on Facebook for a few weeks, odds are high that before long I will completely lose interest and disappear from your Facebook world forever. If you didn't like me enough to bother to get my email address, I shall be nothing more than a tiny asterisk in the footnote of your life any time now.)

As for people I knew way back when... I know we were friends for some reason, but it is in many cases now difficult to recall precisely what that reason might have been. Since I still seem to harbor warm feelings toward you, you probably never stole my boyfriend, or at least not one I wanted all that much. If you were an old boyfriend, odds are that at some point you made my little girly heart go pitty-pat, even if you eventually stomped it into haggis. (This is a safe bet, because I was almost always the dumpee and not the dumper.)

I find myself being annoyed by many email conversations. Look, I know we probably haven't been in touch for 25-30 years, but I'm trying not to dwell on that because I don't want to make you feel old. This does not apply to me, however, because I have found the Fountain of Youth and went from 37 to 25, have remained there for 7 years, and given my impenetrable state of denial and monumentally childish behavior I will probably stay that way till my hips give out. Either from decrepitude or, well, use your imagination.

Truly, I just wish people would do one thing before sending me a private message. Look. At. My. Profile. It's right there, and chock full of useful information. For example, I am clearly a militant-agnostic-slash-atheist. (If I'm anything at all, it would be Total Heathen Pagan.) So the odds that we should have a discussion about the many blessings god has heaped upon you and your direct-from-heaven children are slim. While I'm happy that this is fulfilling for you, I am not really interested. I mean, I can't wrap my brain around that in order to relate in any significant way. Feel free to pray for me, though. I get that a lot.

I'm also a bit on the, shall we say, "unconventional" side. If you checked out my blogs for a bit of a clue-in before writing to me, you'd discover that I write a fair amount about things like sex and accidentally setting my hair on fire (which happens more than you might think), and I tend to use words that you probably don't hear in church or at Gymboree. You would also notice frequent references to liquor, nicotine and tattoos. While I'm undoubtedly smarter (if less educated) than the vast majority of you, I'm not like anybody you're ever going to encounter at bible study or the PTA.

Honestly, I sort of feel sorry for people my age with little kids at home. Sure, they probably felt sorry for me for 18 years, while I was busy being the morbidly obese mother of a kidlet, but that was then and this is now. Plus, my 40s have been My Time. I'm old enough now to be able to learn about myself, and to know what I want and what's important to me. I couldn't have done that in my 20s.

I don't count as "child-free," since I did raise a son who is brilliant, successful, kind to dogs, and not a derelict or serial killer. My parenting method consisted mainly of making sure he knew how to use the microwave and did not stick any metallic objects into electrical outlets. By all reports, he's really grateful. Mission accomplished.

If your only real interest in life involves something like mountain climbing or triathalons, we probably don't have much to say to each other, as the only record I'm trying to break is the number of consecutive hours I can spend on the Sofur in any given weekend. I'm betting I can top my personal best in the fall when we turn the clocks back, and I get an extra hour to work with.

Growing up in a small, rural town and attending a Catholic high school, it was pretty unacceptable to be anything but part of the herd. But now that I'm a grown-up (chronologically, anyway) I get to decide who and what I want to be... and that, my friends, has been a shitload of fun.

I feel obligated to mention that it's been widely noted that I do not possess a "too much information" threshold. I'm likely to tell you just about anything with little or no encouragement. So if you don't want to know, for your own protection, do not ask. Do not even think about asking, because I'll know, and I can guarantee you won't be able to unring that bell.

If you want to get to know me as I am now, that's great. (I am, after all, the Cool One now.) It should be fairly obvious what points we have in common, and we can bond all over again based on that. As long as you don't expect me to send you Glorious Wishes In Celebration of the Ressurrection of Our Beloved Lord And Savior, we're cool. If you're not going to develop heart palpitations every time I use a four letter word (or a creative string of them, including a few I made up myself), we are also cool. If you are going to be able to resist the urge to proselytize every time I mention alcohol or smoking, peachy. At the first mention of AA or Nicorette, I'm totally gone. If you hate dogs or haven't read a book in 20 years, we'll have little to discuss.

In short... Read. My. Profile. Seriously. I read yours.

There are some people I've found with whom I have more in common than I did two or three decades ago, or with whom I still had an uncanny number of things in common, and it's been great to get caught up with them. Others, not so much.

Honestly, Facebook is sort of like being a teenager all over again. You can ignore (or be ignored by) the same people you ignored (or were ignored by) back in the day. And if there is a Facebook friend you are just tickled all to hell to have "found" again, you can totally get psychotically jealous if they seem to be paying more attention to somebody else.

Since I was sure I'd outgrown all this bullshit years ago, I'm starting to think Facebook may not be a positive thing for me. Just take the email addresses of a few foundlings (because you already have the addresses and blogs of the cyber-friends) and be done with it.

It's a really, really good thing I have such a short attention span. And a life that completely suits who I am now.

But, if you'll excuse me, I have to go visit Twitter. I'm having another profound thought.

(PS: Stepher, I totally love you!!!)