Facebook, how do I love and hate thee? Hold on, I think there’s an application on my Super Wall that lets me count the ways.
During my first week of social networking, I had six friends. Then there were fifteen. Then they poured in like sand through my hourglass. Eighty-nine friends have therapeutically quelled any fears left over from first grade as the new kid with a patch over her lazy eye. While others have three-hundred and twenty-six friends, and belong to three separate networks, I’m happy with the eighty-nine I can handle.
I like to believe that furtive developers with names like Brady invented their Facebook applications for connectors like me. But while Brady codes his application with delusions of grandeur, hoping for the next application to transport YouBoob© videos, I wonder if his friend Aaron thinks about how many virtual teddy bear hugs one boomerangs before he or she is dis-friended. But Facebook has proven worthy of me. It’s letting me work my inherited gene, the one I’ve watched my father work during his seventy years to perfect networking.
I keep it simple. I stick to videos and accepting friends, and notice that some are there to participate in our adult popularity contest, while others have forced me to be honest when I ask, “How do I know thee?”
Like Kevin, who landed in my Facebook Inbox to tell me that he liked my “style.” I’ll admit that his picture was precious and the thought of a boy-toy under the Christmas tree appealed to me, but Kevin was no one I knew and reeked of smack-talking spam.
The next week, two best friends of my seventh grade and college boyfriend, respectively, both found me on Facebook one afternoon. When I asked my seventh grade friend, Andrew, who he was, since I didn’t remember, he admitted his behavior from the past. “I was really shy around you as you were deemed one of the Wilmette Junior High School hotties.” I scrolled down to see if I could update my mood to “Flattered,” thanked him for the twenty-year-old compliment, and accepted our newfound friendship.
