Resistance Is Futile

Life in high school tends to be very public. With everyone your age still living at home, the closest any of you ever comes to "my own place" is a decent-sized basement and parents who let you and your friends hang out uninterrupted. Although, I think my friends and I mostly hung out in my parents' room watching Days of Our Lives, now that I think about it.

(Aside: Whenever I am in Target and I pass the small appliance aisle and I see the deep fat fryers, all I ever want to do is put on horn-rimmed glasses, buck out my teeth, and wear a fake purple pregnancy pillow so I can pretend that I'm my own doppelganger who is carrying my father-in-law's baby so that I can pretend I wasn't really taking birth control pills even though my husband - who is actually pretending to be blind but he is a Demira and you should have known you can't ever trust a Demira - totally saw me and knows I was on the pill but is not saying anything for fear of driving me further into the arms of John Black who may or may not be Roman Brady. Sigh - those were the golden years of that show.)

Without licenses or, when those are obtained, cars to drive, you tend to travel in packs, chauffeured about by whoever managed to beg the family Pontiac 6000 for the evening. One of your compatriots is usually working the close shift at McDonald's or A&W, so you often end up hanging out in restaurants.

Of course, if you grow up in Steinbach, you also tend to go to church youth group for fun, so when you're not dipping french fries in mayonnaise and ketchup, you're singing endless rounds of Love - The- Lordyourgod - Withallyour - Heart -and - Allyoursoul - Andallyour - Mind -And - Luvalluvmankind...

Everything goes on in front of everybody else. Had a fight with your locker partner? The whole school knows. Snark someone for wearing nail polish in music class? One hour and it's all over the place. Break up with your girlfriend in the aforementioned McDonald's (because heaven forbid you'd ever end your two-month relationship in private, Ben W., and give your girlfriend the dignity of shrieking her "nooo - NOOOO!!!" without an audience)? It's the talk o' the cafeteria.

Is it just me or is Facebook high school all over again?

Because! I now have 15 friends. This is a 1500% increase in the number of FB friends I had at this time last week. It's like every time I open my email now, somebody wants to be my friend.

(You like me - you REALLY like me!)

But pretty much all I've done FB-wise this week is accept all these requests. Because as gratifying as all this attention is, I'm still struggling a bit with this newfangled soh-shul net-werking thing.

So I knew there was this "wall" and that people could write on it. And I knew about the status thing. But riddle me this, FB-ers - why do other people's comments on my FRIENDS' (15!!) pages show up on MY page? Does everyone who looks at my page know that someone who is a total stranger to me is laughing about one of my friend's foibles?

And does this mean that if I respond to someone whom I DO know, and who is my fur-real friend, my response actually gets plastered onto the page of all of THEIR friends (whom I probably do NOT know)?

I feel like Cary Grant in Rear Window or like The Husband's neighbours back when he was still on a party line and they always listened in on our teenage-romantical phone calls. I get updates about the stuff people I know like and what they're doing and what their friends are saying to them and who added whom as friends and is it just me or is that a whole lot of information I shouldn't know?!

Also: I have tried to tell FB I am a girl 10 times and it refuses to listen to me. I applaud gender-specificity as a response to the grim spectre of plural pronoun use for a single subject, but it has to actually work, you know?

Sigh. I am clearly too old for this. I should've joined FB back when life was all cheeseburger courtship rituals, communal pots of Carmex, and reading out the names of people with three lateslips over the PA every morning. Maybe it would have made more sense.

But I'll soldier on. Next week's task: figuring out how to update my profile so I'm not some anonymous silhouette. Which activity will then be noted on 1,000 pages of people I don't actually know, right?

(/ Seven of Nine)