Jill Rants and Raves: an open (face)book

I've been threatening this blog for weeks - ever since I noticed my number of Facebook friends lost a digit. Suddenly my total swooped from 174 to a shaky 173. Don't worry though, dear readers, I've since made up my quota and I'm back heading toward the giddy heights of 200 friends on Facebook. Do I get a gold star for that. Perhaps not. Who has 200 friends for heavens sake? I know Alison Bechdel has almost 1,000 and Susie Bright is probably way past that, but I had this little fantasy when I took my first tentative steps into the online world of social networking that my friends would actually all be ...well...friends...of mine. People I know. People I would invite for dinner if they lived within 20 miles, or people I'd go stay with because they already know they can leave their house in my care and I won't rob them.

But it seems inevitable, especially when you are as social as I am, that the notification emails telling me someone has added me as a friend, sometimes leave me bewildered. Who the f____k is that? Sometimes they are kind enough to add a note - "hey, Jill remember me? I pushed you down the stairs at the Women's Disco once. I'm a successful corporate legal counsel now". I always confirm those - I worry what they'll do if I don't. And you never know when you might need a good attorney. Or there's those who have 40 friends in common with you - well, I always add them. After all if they're having a huge party with my friends I'd better make sure I get invited. Sometimes I have no fucking idea and I frantically go look at their photo and search the remnants of my memory banks, and sometimes just come up empty. So I sit on it for a few days and I'll be honest with you - I check their friends list first.

I sometimes make the first move and add people as friends, and then doesn't it kill ya when they don't reply? THEY'RE THINKING ABOUT IT???? Mmm, do I want to add Jill Posener? And then there are those that are suggested as friends, and you have no idea why, but you have to add them because your friend from high school thought it was a good idea. It is, in short - a freakin' nightmare. And I love it, am a total FB afficionado. I have a Cause of my own and a group called Got Dachshund and a heavy Lexulous addiction, and I added music lists and DogBook, and I dutifully wrote my 25 Random Things (y'all know what I'm talking about - you've all done this) and..and ...and my Pathwords score is higher than ANY of my almost 200 friends. So fuckin' there!!

I have almost constant contact with my niece whom I worship, and I'm in conversation with my Australian friends, and my London friends and I'm making new friends (after all, once you are FB friends you might as well make the most of it, right?), I'm genuinely enjoying people who I have loved and thought were lost and am getting challenged to scrabble games by upstart youngsters in Adelaide. It is all pretty perfect. Except.

I am beginning to worry that everyone else is having a perfectly fabulous Facebook life. Except for me. Their relationship status oozes red hearts, they all seem married or engaged and their photo albums glow with wedding day pics and baby pics and their status updates from their iphones talk of glorious things their precocious children said a moment ago, they are flying off to exotic places to show their latest independent film, they have climbed Mt Kilimanjaro with a Buddhist monk, or they are going to an event I didn't get invited to, or they are off to a party with my forty friends...it's a worry. And god knows, I need more to worry about.

But I think I'm getting the hang of it - recently I said I wanted to go to Palermo and Karin immediately sent me details of our imaginary trip, I mused that I really wanted to go to Cuba and Del La Grace Volcano suggested we might go together and freak everyone out and when I said I hated Valentines Day I got called a grump. When I crushed my elbow into the side of a house (don't ask), twenty people seemed to care, though they couldn't bring me chicken soup from London. And someone just asked 'hey Jill, do we really know each other?' I have no idea, but we're FB friends, aint we? Until of course that fateful day when the total slips a digit and you have so many friends you can't for the life of you work out who did the dirty deed. Which brings me to 'removing as friend'...or perhaps I'd better just check on my total at FB first.....

Comments

I know what you mean about those who don't answer the friend request. Recently, I found my old therapist who helped me during my coming out period. She moved away leaving me therapistless.

She didn't answer... I must have been a very scary patient.

Posted by: nina | February 16, 2009 at 05:21 AM