A few things about Facebook

Last week, an old boyfriend sent me a friend request through Facebook but I didn’t realize he was an old boyfriend at first because almost thirty years have passed since we dated and I use that term loosely since I’m not sure if making out on the couch for hours at a time constitutes actual dating but regardless, I didn’t recognize his name right away so I let his request sit idle for a couple of days while I racked my brain trying to remember who he was and considering I am terrible with names and often refer to my own kids as Stretch Marks #1-80 and #81-200, remembering a name from thirty years ago was nearly impossible.

Do I win something for writing the longest sentence in the history of ever?

Eventually I recalled his name and had an aha! moment and can I just say how refreshing it is to have an aha! moment that is not accompanied by a 60 watt light bulb hovering over an apparition of a trash can with a pedal-operated lid? If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then you obviously don’t own a seven pound puppy who likes to feast on bloody feminine hygiene products he fishes out of the garbage because he thinks he’s half-vampire.

If memory served, my old boyfriend was a good kisser. And he taught me how to look right, then left, then right again before making a left hand turn. Just to clarify, that was while I was learning how to drive. In a car. I wasn’t anywhere near a couch when those instructions were given. Oh, and he once gave me a picture of himself so that I could hang it in my locker as proof that I wasn’t totally repulsive to the male species. SO THERE, WORLD. Therefore, I accepted his friend request despite the fact that when he broke up with me, he asked for that picture back. I wound up giving him back his picture and he wound up giving me mono. Seeing as how I missed two weeks of school and didn’t have to smell my obscenely obese French teacher for fourteen whole days, it wasn’t such a bad deal.

It took a long time for me to become interested in Facebook. I put it off for as long as I could because I was already spending an enormous amount of time online and the last thing I needed was yet one more bloated, engorged, time-sucking leech upon my day. Especially on Tuesdays because it was all I could do to keep up with the Law & Order: SVU marathons on that day. Hellooooooo Detective Stabler. You and your manly man tattoos are absolutely yummy.

I need a moment.

Where was I?

So I managed to avoid Facebook for awhile but as is often the case when people around me are involved in something and I’m not and I’m left alone to yell WHERE THE HELL DID EVERYONE GO to anyone who will listen which is no one because they’re all too busy updating their status on Facebook, I resigned myself to my fate and hopped on the crowded bandwagon and opened up a Facebook account. And then I created a fan page for my blog as well.

I’ve been on Facebook for awhile now and I quite like it. I’ve connected with so many old friends and made quite a few new friends and I just enjoy my time there. However, it took a little bit of work to get to that point.

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STUFF I’VE LEARNED ABOUT FACEBOOK

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FIRST STUFF

In my opinion, Facebook is a bitch to navigate and when I say bitch, I mean it in the most vile, obnoxious, sadistic, wrinkly-old-hag-with-a-prolapsed-uterus sense of the word. Last week, I had to enlist the help of my friend Heather to find where on Facebook I could search for people via school or workplace. Heather kept sending me emails with instructions and screenshots and I’d send her my own screenshots with emails entitled I ARE STUPID wherein I cried like a baby and asked for her best guesstimate as to when I became an utter and complete moron. She said she didn’t know but thought it might have been last October, right around the time when we were planning lunch and she proposed any day but Wednesday and I responded with Perfect! Wednesday it is! See you at noon!

We hopped on the chat feature and she tried to guide me from there and we soon realized that I was seeing something completely different on Facebook than what she was seeing and I immediately assumed that it was some vast conspiracy by the entire Internet, or my kids, to get me the hell off Facebook. Heather disagreed and said it was probably some personal vendetta that Mark Zuckerberg had against me. Because she likes to screw with my psyche and knows perfectly well that saying something like that to a paranoid freak of nature like me is exactly like donating a case of free ephedrine to a meth lab except without all the felonies. But having never met Zuckerberg, I thought it an unlikely scenario until I remembered that stranger things have happened. Once, when Nate and I were on our honeymoon three thousand miles away in San Francisco, we walked right passed the woman who had been in charge of our wedding dinner in New York three weeks prior, the same woman who had been refusing to credit our charge card for the double payment we made for that dinner and when I say “we” I obviously mean Nate because I am anal about money and Nate spends $25 on football jerseys for puppies who think they’re vampires.

I wanted to tackle this woman, extract her plasma, sell it for some spending money and then fling her off the Golden Gate Bridge but Nate didn’t want to get arrested on our honeymoon if it wasn’t going to be for anything sexual so we let her go. We were ultimately refunded the duplicate payment upon our return to New York but that’s not the point. The point is that weird things do happen and while I’ve never met Zuckerberg, I can tell you that while I was chatting with Heather, the page I was searching for on Facebook magically appeared after I refreshed my screen for the twenty-seventh time and then it disappeared all over again. So Zuckerberg probably does hate me. Which just goes to show you that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

SECOND STUFF

When I peruse my news feed, I like to actually be interested in what I’m reading. For the record, I am not interested in reading about games. I do not care about who is killing who in some virtual gangster crime family nor am I interested in reading posts asking for three more goats to fertilize a make believe farm in East Jesus and the only way I want to find out about who will dominate the culinary world is by watching Top Chef because Tom Colicchio is strangely hot and I want to be Padma when I grow up except without the wicked arm scar because I’m allergic to pain.

It’s not that I don’t like games because I do. Especially family games! Except for Risk because I’m not into world domination if Anderson Cooper isn’t on the scene and reporting live from my lap and honestly, if you’re married to Nate who is a bit obsessed with this game, Risk is nothing but a divorce or a blunt force trauma to the head waiting to happen. And speaking of games, can I just say that Parcheesi gets a raw deal? That game is fun and would probably be played more if it had a better sounding name instead of one that sounds like some sort of ancient fungus.

If I could remember the person who told me how to delete these kinds of posts from my wall, I’d send him or her one of those edible arrangement things but a really small one because hello? Those things are expensive as hell. And for what? It’s scoops of cantaloupe and some apple wedges. What am I missing?

THIRD STUFF

Likewise, if I wanted to read a litany of vents and complaints and accusations that people suck and are constantly out to get you, I’d just as soon call my mom and tell her to email me about the time she went to the movies and had to pay $4.25 for bottled water. Reading an occasional bitch fest or vent bender on Facebook is fine but 24/7? Just start a blog already. I did.

Oh, and religous stuff? I don’t need to be saved on Facebook. That’s what Nutella is for.

FOURTH STUFF

I am really hesitant to accept people as friends if I’m not sure how I know them. If we have mutual friends in common or they’ve been referred by another friend, it’s no biggie and more than likely I’ll accept the request because I’m all about trusting the judgment of people whom I’ve never actually met or haven’t seen in thirty years but if we don’t have any mutual friends, then a little personal message with your request would be helpful, i.e., Hey Andy! Remember me? We once peed in a sandbox together! I think it was your 21st birthday. How the hell are you?

FIFTH STUFF

If you are an assy douche noodle who got your rocks off by humiliating me in front of your friends in the senior hallway back in high school, then I don’t want to be your friend on Facebook and I don’t care how many requests you send or how many people suggest you or how many times you tried to talk to me at our reunion. If your colossal display of moral turpitude with a drunken, female classmate at the reunion is any indication, you haven’t changed a bit. You are nothing but a skank with a penis. However, I do appreciate the opportunity to use “moral turpitude” in a sentence other than “How can I use moral turpitude in a sentence?” So, thanks for that. Now, take your skanky penis and go away.

How many of you out there are on Facebook? What have you learned so far?

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