The morass that is social networking

Last week I ran away from Facebook.

To be fair, I'd been moving away from it for awhile. At first I started gradually inching away, as if carrying on a conversation with it at a crowded party and feigning a trip to the snacks laid out on the kitchen counter. I avoided eye contact; I answered questions with nondescript head shakes and barely audible mumbles; I played with my phone and pretended to check emails... But Facebook didn't take the hint. It kept yammering away with a thousand updates every second and invitations to do everything from starting a pretend farm to joining a pretend Mafia.

Frustrated, I turned on my heel and walked away. But it kept following me and blathering.

Did I know that 62 of my friends were fans of Skyline Chili?

I assumed so, if not more. I mean, it's just so damned delicious! I'd wager that more than 62 of my friends are slaves to its cinnamon and paprika charms. But I digress.

Was I aware that my wife liked True Blood?

Well duh, we watch it together.

Did I know that Barack Obama was encouraging all 42-year-old men to become police officers?

Admittedly, that I did not know, and I remain skeptical. But hell, the man has already floored me with policy changes he'd promised he'd never make, so I guess anything is possible.

At this point I broke into a full run, moving as fast for the door as I could. It was then that I heard Facebook say, "Hey, this is one cute video of your kid on the swing set!"

Um, what the hell? I set that video (like all my others) so that "Only Friends" could view it. How in the world did it get reset to "Everyone?" I stripped all my videos from Facebook's hands and threw them in the trash. Checking my photo albums, I found that (for the third time on some of them) many had been reset to "Friends of Friends" after I'd set them all to "Only Friends." Into the trash they went too. Now I took off in a full sprint out the door and across the backyard.

Thankfully Facebook has become a fat, lumbering beast and couldn't keep up with me. However, in a move far more crafty than I could have anticipated, it instead sent three separate women from my past on a textbook buttonhook route to intercept me. Despite my clearly happy marriage and family life displayed prominently on Facebook, these women (some in their own ostensibly happy marriages) began shouting salutations of lust and promises of ardor whose intensity would only be matched by its secrecy.

Calling an audible and breaking into a wheel route, I left the skanks face down in the turf and began hopping fences of the neighboring homes until I came to the end of the line--a deep ravine looking over a rocky stream far below. I paused long enough to hear Facebook yell, "If you deactivate your account, don't worry! It can't ever be deleted so it'll be right there waiting for you when you log back in!"

Screw it. Thelma and Louise time.

In the days since then I've been recovering, slowly. I pull out my iPhone and then wonder why I did so, momentarily forgetting that I have about 35 other apps. I miss seeing Jen's status updates even though she's sitting three feet from me in the same room. I miss looking at a roll of 157 pictures from a party in which a friend of mine was tagged in one shot and I rifle through the rest like some barely invited burglar. I honestly miss the updates of about five of my close friends from the past who I don't get to see much otherwise.

As for the rest, I discovered that after the initial coolness of reconnecting with friends from kindergarten through college that I haven't seen since the end of those eras of my life, we all gravitated back to the original state of drifted-apart. Facebook (and other social networking sites) reconnect what life has through its natural course has put asunder, and maybe there's something to be said for leaving well enough alone.

I'm also very happy not to be constantly worrying (as a person in my profession would naturally do) about the constant "updating" of their security policies that randomly make my children's photos visible to the whole world (or most of it) despite my repeated attempts to restrict them to my group of friends.

Finally, since my ego clearly mandates that I cajole people into reading things I've written, I always have this blog to pour my "status updates" into whenever I see fit. Probably the same dozen people who subscribe to this blog were the only ones reading my updates on Facebook anyway, so it all works out.

And for those of you who miss me on Facebook and wonder where I've gone, my email still works. You can "friend me" in real life any time you like. ;-)