To Friend Or Not To Friend

At first I thought I was too old for this FaceBook thing. Well, that’s not altogether true. At first I didn’t understand what the hell it was. Second, because of the first, I thought I was too old. When I was eventually able to wrap my 45 year-old brain around the concept, I figured it was simply a ridiculous waste of time. But I kept hearing my friends tell stories of finding people from their past-- roommates from college, buddies from high school and distant cousins. I was intrigued, and besides I’m not that damn old. Proving that I’m a savvy citizen of the modern world I moved past my confusion and scorn.

I got on-line and filled out the form, indicating that I wanted to link to a few of my closest friends. That’s what I thought, anyway. I have no idea exactly where I screwed up, but somehow I clicked something that told FaceBook to send an email invitation ‘to be my friend’ to EVERYONE IN MY EMAIL ADDRESS BOOK. That’s right, everyone who exists in my email landscape was sent a message from FaceBook inviting them to check out my web page and be my friend. Bankers, business contacts, distant acquaintances, people I don’t particularly like, and people I never want to speak to again all received this amiable overture. It’s like sending a wedding invitation to everyone you’ve bumped into in the last few years, and the last few years have been a bit rough.

Naturally I was so embarrassed I considered changing my name and moving to a remote jungle village where the electronic world couldn’t follow me, although that’s probably not possible -- I wouldn’t be surprised if you could pick up a wireless signal from a treehouse in Papua New Guinea. There was nowhere to run. This was worse than my white pants incident of the 9th grade, and it’s hard to get worse than that. Picture me, a chubby, self-conscious kid, hiding in the girls’ bathroom during biology class with a miniscule offensive dot on the very center of the crotch of my pants. You probably couldn’t see the damn thing with a microscope, but who could take the chance? I had to do something, so I took off my pants and washed them out in the sink. Miraculously it worked, but then of course I ended up with wet pants. Spot free, but wet, which was not as bad as before, but still a serious problem. And of course, I was also standing in the bathroom in my underwear. Utterly desperate to avoid embarrassment, I did what any resourceful high school girl would do; I grabbed my pants by the ankles and started swinging them over my head to dry them in the breeze. After a short while I became confident that I’d be back in the hallway, free of stains and dampness by the end of the hour. I got comfortable, forgetting that what I was doing was totally weird and sat down on the edge of the sink, whistled a jolly tune, and continued to swing my pants around and around like a lasso. That’s when Sister Sandra walked in.

Not so savvy then, not so savvy now.

The FaceBook debacle is the electronic equivalent of being caught in my underwear, only this time in front of upwards of a hundred people – friends, acquaintances and enemies alike. But life goes on and so do millions of signals zinging through cyber space so although I don’t think I ever looked Sister Sandra in the eye again, I hoped that this time the constant bombardment of messages would distract my ersatz friends and they’d forget about me and that stupid invitation. After a few weeks I recovered enough from the extreme embarrassment of the techno- faux pas to open my FaceBook web page.

Now that I actually look at FaceBook, I’ve got a few problems with it. Most notably, I was right: It is just plain silly. For one thing, it encourages the use of ‘to friend’ as a verb. Not to befriend, but ‘to friend,’ as in, “Hey, I friended you and you didn’t friend me back,” meaning I sent you an invitation to join my network of friends and you have not accepted my offer. Ok, so I friended you is a little more efficient use of words, but it's still a horrible bastardization of a lovely language right on par with spelling light with an ite. (Lite beer makes me want to puke in more ways than one.)

Next, people I don’t know or barely know have ‘friended’ me. Initially I felt guilty, like a horrible FaceBook snob if I didn’t accept. Then I noticed that a lot of these people have more than 1000 friends. They don’t really want to be my friend they’re just using me to jack up their numbers. These FaceBook whores will friend anyone.

My last major issue is with the people who over FaceBook (I call them OFB’s). OFB’s feel the need to cast their frivolous thoughts out indiscriminately, like the way a drag queen tosses colored beads at a Mardi Gras parade. For those of you who are unfamiliar with FaceBook, each person’s website has a box at the top of the screen with a sentence for the participant to fill in and then post for all their friends to see, so that everyone knows what they are doing or feeling or about to do or just did. For example, when I open my webpage I am encouraged to complete the sentence, Jonesy is______. I fill it in occasionally, but am utterly incapable of being earnest. I say things like, “Jonesy is counting to ten.” Or “Jonesy is contemplating all the trouble in River City.” But some of my friends (and I use the term loosely) complete this sentence every freaking 15 minutes. They post compulsively, as if they just can’t help themselves, like the way some people play slot machines. “So-and-so is laughing.” “So-and-so wants to have another cup of coffee.” Wow. Riveting stuff. Don’t these people have jobs? Lives? Real friends? I barely even know these OFB’s and I’m not sure why but they annoy the hell out of me. Sara says I should unfriend them. Sara’s always right.

On the positive side I’ve connected with several people I’d considered a part of my distant past. I’m prompted to call or email my actual friends so we don’t lose touch. I get the occasional chuckle from some silly comment. And, I am reminded that silly can be good.

Jonesy is finished writing on her blog.