Facebook

Here's my theory about Facebook: The top memes are alcohol and ass-kissing, and the unspoken magnet is fantasizing about people you can't have. For example, there is a high instance of replies to one of my friends by the same married woman, full of standard sycophant language. There are large numbers of pics of friends I have since deleted where they are drunk at parties, and hamming it up for the camera by stressing their faces into various inhuman emotions meant to look cool, or to look like they are having fun.

It started bugging me, and I decided to be petty. I went on a rampage deleting apps, quiz results, my comments on people's walls, pictures and videos I had posted, and removing people from my friends list that were not truly friends. This included people I had vague curiosity about and was stalking, people I had only met a couple times, and, sadly, people I was acquainted with in school and had no animosity towards, many of them interesting and world-travelers, posting pics and commentary about their journeys. They were the exceptions to the madness.

Maybe it was wrong of me to unfriend you, Terry, Ann, Bert, JJ, Seth, Andrea, as you had interesting stuff to say that I enjoyed looking at. But honestly, were we friends? You are Bill's friends, and he, and the AP, are our only connection. Our relationships probably wouldn't have deepened into something meaningful by virtue of Facebook. You were "interesting people I know", which maybe should have it's own category, maybe not. Is there such a thing as "cool by proxy"? Does knowing cool people make me cool? Finally, am I online to try to look cool? Don't know. I know I like to write, and I know I like to write about people I love. If that gets me a circle of sycophants, but experience tells me it won't.

So, hey, I wouldn't go delete everything (and everybody) again, but I have no regrets. And if any of you are interested in real friendship and not just "oh, hey Curtis, um.. how's it going? Good...good... Is Bill there?" then friend me, or better yet, send me an email. Or call. Or just come over. My door is always open, and my dog doesn't bite. Come on in and make yourself at home. And if you cook my food, make enough for everyone, and leave a note explaining what the hell happened if you leave before I get home, that'd be nice, too.

Anyway, so I purged, and then started over slowly by posting a single picture of Scout, and I turned the description into a small blog entry, as the UI just let me keep typing. The result appealed to me, people could stumble across a big story where they expect a quick description to be. So I uploaded a few more pictures, and went on at length about each of them, all about Stacey, and Scout, and Liberty, and how much I love all three of them. I re-added basic info to my purged profile, replied to some of my friends' notes, posted a couple status changes.

Not much action on any of it, except from the people I'm already close to... the way it should be. I don't expect much commentary on me doting on my family - in fact, 9 years of writing this blog (and it's predecessor) has taught me that family diaries don't attract fanfare. And yet, I feel good writing about the people I love, so I'll keep doing that.