facebooking, hmmmm (yes, it is a verb), or, I am a crazy person, protect your children from me...

In the past few months, I joined Facebook, and am an admitted addict. My husband does not understand the attraction, and no amount of hard sell will change that, which is fine. I am a voraciously social person. I get very attached to the people in my life, and even after a relationship may have ended, I still wonder about their whereabouts. I do not obsess, but something may remind of that person (a song, an expression a smell), and I just think "what is Jill up to these days?" In many ways, Facebook eliminates these mysteries. I know that one friend is happy, another is glad to be home, or watching a movie, or eating something tasty. Mundane little nuggets that make you feel connected to that person, who could be doing that inane thing, thousands of miles away. In many ways FB satisfies the sentimentalist in me.



I am a bit shy about requesting friends, though, especially people from high school. That was a tough time for me, and I know that my teen social skills were even less stellar than today's. I take rejection very personally, and wonder what they will think when they see my request, blahh blahh blahh, I apparently need a shrink. ("My neuroses are part of my charm", at least that is how I try to sell it). Anyway, I recently added my maiden name to my FB, so that if someone really wanted to find me, they could. Well, just recently someone did.



This was a junior high and beginning of high school classmate. In seventh and eighth grades, we spent a lot of time together, and our relationship was one of those cantankerous, snarky, picking-on-each-other things, that in retrospect, is questionable at best. His family moved away after freshman year (I think).



His name had kept coming up as "people you may know", and I had decided that, yes I do know him, but he can stay on the right hand side of my FB page. After I changed my name, he put in a friend request, with the message "Well, look who I found...How life?Do you keep in touch with any old friends?"**. I accepted the request, but didn't respond back to the message. I have several "friends" that I don't correspond with, and that is fine, and I felt this was appropriate with "Seth".



So, a week or two later I get this on my wall: "So you dont want to talk to me or what" which gets me a little fired up. Bad grammar aside, Facebook is supposed to be fun, and this was feeling not fun. (Reading this post so far, I realize that it sounds like I am overreacting, which is why I gave some back story on the relationship with said snarkster. I could hear the tone of his voice inside my head, and the tone was not good, that tone had not changed since high school, also not good). So, I replied back, and I must paraphrase "whoa there cowboy, don't get all FB creepy. We all have lives outside of FB, just been a little busy" which is all kinds of witchy/bitchy, zero to sixty in seconds, I know. To which he replies "Oh my...I see some people never change",to which I reply "agreed", and he unfriends me (which is why I couldn't copy my exact reply from his wall, he unfriended me).



See? Just what I was worried about. Drama. High school drama (the worst kind), which is exactly why I am skittish about people from my past. This whole discourse makes me sound unchanged during those long 20 years, still so defensive and sarcastic. I have changed, I have softened a little, and I hate how easily I slipped back into the role that people expect me to play. I hated my role in high school. If I were forced (at gunpoint, death threats to loved ones) to go back and do it again, I would do very little the same. I would hopefully take myself less seriously, and just be a happier person.



I am a happy person, and now "Seth" won't have the opportunity to bask in the glow of my deliciously insightful status reports. He'll never know that I wore super-cute tights today, or when I am forced to yell at clients, or if I am having a hard time figuring out what to eat for lunch. So sad, so sad.



The moral of this super long, incredibly silly and self indulgent rant? Have fun, people, laugh a little (especially at yourself).

Life is too short to take shit from some dick on Facebook!
(that would make an awesome tee shirt, or flair!)



**these were direct quotes (complete with bad grammar) cut and pasted directly from FB. Thank you technology!



By the way, he's not the first person to unfriend me, (take a moment to get over your shock), but his unfriending makes way more sense than the first. That one is still a frackin' mystery (person in question friended and unfriended me twice! You think I am mentally unstable...).

(all this use of friend and unfriend as verbs has made my spellcheck all wacky)


next posts will be to catch up on project 365!