A "Friend Request" From Who? For Me?

Most of the people currently reading this blog, and thank you by the way, are getting here through Facebook. You are either on my friend list, on my husband's friends list or as seems to be getting to be the case, friends of friends of friends. So I thought Facebook would be a good subject for this here blog. Because Facebook is a weird place. I've heard it called the MySpace for the older crowd. Rude yes, but maybe partially true. Where MySpace is more "creative", Facebook is more concise and clear.

It makes me wonder if that's because as we get older too many creative choices equates to too much chaos and since most of us have all the chaos we can handle between kids, jobs, traffic, and taxes, more chaos is just too much? I'll admit that I feel less pressure on Facebook. Less pressure to have a cool layout underlying my information and less pressure to add music that will make people think I'm edgy not stodgy. I LIKE the clean lines and boring colors of Facebook. Its easy on my tired brain.

But it's still a weird place. When you first open a Facebook account you have one of two friends, most likely family or people you're currently very close to. Then you start exploring. You think of names and when you search them, there they are! You send friend requests that are accepted and suddenly now their friend list is accessible to you and you see other people you used to know and so on, and so on and so on. Which, I found to be very cool, if not slightly disconcerting with all the old and balding pretending to be the people I knew.

However, the weird part comes in when you stop to think for a minute and realize that without this electronic medium, you would never have seen or talked to these people again or in the first place and, in fact you may never even have thought of them again. Now, I don't mean that to be as callus as it sounds, its just that until the beginning of MySpace, Facebook and the rest, it was the natural way of things. The Darwinism of friends.

Now though, you are confronted with what sometimes seems like every thought during the day, not to mention in some cases, every movement and interaction in the outside world of these people. And the question is, do I really need to know what that guy from fourth grade is doing with his dog at the park, or when the woman I used to drink with at Carlos and Pepe's years ago is standing in line for take-out? YES! - Apparently I must answer with a resounding YES, because I am on Facebook four or five (ok maybe a few more) times per day, scrolling down the posts of my friends. I admit it, I am addicted to your lives. Most of you I barely know, barely ever knew, or in the case of friends of friends, don't have the faintest idea who you are, and yet I find myself trying to figure out your cryptic postings and reading the comments from your other friends. I send hugs and drinks back and forth and most lately, I throw food at you. Its fun, its silly, and just maybe its a way to interact with people I would never in a million years do otherwise.

But someone made a very interesting point about Facebook and friendships to me the other day that I want to share. My friend, a very real and face to face friend, asked if I thought it was weird that people you were never friends with in junior high and high school were suddenly making friend requests of you on Facebook. I knew exactly what she was talking about. Neither of us were in the "popular" crowd so to speak in school, and on occasion perhaps had even been picked on or teased by those same kids and yet, now here they were asking to be Facebook friends. Like I said, Facebook is weird.

So, what do you do when (ok, I'm dating myself here) you are twenty or so years out of high school and someone who never knew you existed wants to hook up on Facebook?

I figure there are three options: (In fact I'm sure there are quite a few more and if you can think of any, feel free to add a comment and let us all know)

First (and most boring) - You could realize that as an adult all of that high school stuff is behind you and you accept the friendship request and send a polite little note back.

Second - You can accept their friend request and spend time checking them out, realizing that really, they didn't turn out any better than you did, and in some cases maybe worse.

And Third- You could push that Ignore button and for a glorious moment of immaturity feel like you had some power over them that you never had in high school. Of course choosing three means that you never get to learn what you would from ch0oseing two and what a shame, cause its a guilty pleasure to find out that the most popular girl in school still has the same child, bill, and relationship issues we all ended up with and sometimes you find out the boy voted most likely to suceed lives in his parents basement, blogging about Facebook. ;)

But still, there is one thing I've learned from Facebook, and that is that no matter who are, we all type one word at a time, and that most of us don't use spellcheck.


And P.S. I've mostly chosen #1 in case your wondering. And if you ask me to I would swear to that on a pack of bibles. No wait, better make that a pack of gum instead. LOL.

Thanks for reading!