People who at one point knew me

I hate to inform everyone about this but Facebook is no longer cool. See, like all cutting edge technologies there is a tipping point in which it becomes so popular that it ceases being cool. Based on the fact now that it is odd for me to find someone not on Facebook I really feel that the point has been crossed. However, as opposed to the Friendsters and MySpaces of the world Facebook is still really, really useful so I expect it to hang around for a long while. I’ll stay on it; I just won’t feel hip and cutting edge for doing so.

(And before you ask, no I am not setting up a twitter feed. If you’ve read this site for any length of time the concept of me writing anything meaningful in 150 characters is pretty ludicrous.)

But there is something about Facebook that has really been bugging me and I just have to get it off my chest here. When I started on it my friends were legitimately friends or at least strong acquaintances. These were people I worked with or went to Notre Dame with. Then it started growing as more people from my past began to find me. It is pretty cool to catch up with an old friend from college and even more so when it is someone from back in the grade school or high school days. But then it gets a little weirder.

At some point you start getting requests from people you haven’t thought about for twenty years. I always assume that the reverse is true; I have a hard time believing that anyone would ever find me so memorable that after twenty years they’d go “I wonder what Chris is doing?” This is followed by the friend requests from people you don’t even remember. They theoretically know you and they are convinced that they were your classmate but you simply don’t recall them at all. For me this is pretty frightening because it means that there is this huge blank spot in my photographic memory.

So I would like to propose the following rule. All friend requests are subject to a three fact rule. To become friends if you do not see or speak to this person on a regular basis you must be able to recite three facts about them. Doesn’t matter what they are, just state three facts about their history. This way we will keep Facebook as a collection of people who know each other as opposed to random lists of people you at one time came across.

My other issue is that there really is this strange reaction I get when befriending people from high school on Facebook. Now don’t get me wrong, I really find it cool and a few read the blog which is amazing, but it really does transport you back to that timeframe. Which means that I am constantly trying to deal with all of those emotions of high school most of which I never want to relive. I’ve left that part of me in the distant past and I don’t have a great desire to go back.

But that is exactly what you do. You constantly try to portray yourself in the best light possible (or at least I do). I want to show that I am successful and have accomplished all of my goals and am happy whether any of those things are true or not. Suddenly I find myself in a popularity contest with people I haven’t seen for twenty years. Which is made even worse when I realize that mathematically speaking I am closer to 50 than I am to 15.

Wow, that last sentence is true. I’m just going to curl up in the corner and sob quietly for a moment. Excuse me.

In the end I have prided myself on living my life under no one’s rules but my own. That means that on the bell curve of experiences I typically find myself at either end but never in the middle. Which makes it a little strange when you meet up with people you sat next to years ago and you realize that your lives are completely different. If I am in the right mood my reaction is that I don’t really care. If I’m happy and they’re happy then who is to say who took the right path? But sometimes I do wonder just how I got here and where this road is going to take me.