Well, Karen got me on Facebook recently, more for marketing purposes than anything else. I am not a fan, let me just say. I don't have the energy to do what most people do on there. Not being very well-connected with any family, it's of little use to me in the ways it is for other folks. And I understand that. With families dispersed around the country if not the world, Facebook serves a purpose. I'm just not one of them.
One thing that Facebook does that drives me nuts is provide a forum for all those people who, in emails, send chain mail. Not only do they do that in abundance on FB, but FB now has these games that require people to beg other members for gifts and what not much in the same dependency-inducing way that chain mail works. There's just too much goofiness for me on FB.
That being said, it is a necessary evil. Since I've eschewed much of what passes for mainstream technology these days -- smart phones, hybrid cars, large screen TV's, -- this is a small concession to the onslaught of the binary world. I do what I have to and get out of there.
But today as a break from business blogging I went on my FB and trolled around looking for other members of my networking group whom I've missed when sending out friend requests (seriously? You have to ask someone to be your friend? And this came from someone who attended Harvard? Wait, strike that. That makes perfect sense coming from Harvard...).
Anyway, along the way I saw a name that I thought was from the past, but wasn't. It was a name of a particularly obnoxious high school classmate whom I loathed. So I checked it out. It wasn't him, but I went to find him and...lo and behold, there was Mr. Wonderful himself. Same toothy grin, same air of superiority he always had. Only now he's clutching his wife, another classmate of ours, who must have lost her mind when she decided to date and then marry him. Who says people don't go over to the Dark Side?
All of us look older, for the most part, and it's hilarious to me to now see those girls, now women, who had tongues hanging out all over town. One in about a hundred (not that I saw that many of them, I'm just saying very, very few) of them retained any semblance of their looks. The same could be said for me if I'd ever had any looks with which to begin, I know, but these girls had guys pining for them. If we'd only known then what we see now...
What's amusing to me is the newfound friendships that have arisen over the years. The nerds have been befriended by the jocks, the wallflowers by the homecoming court. Strange bedfellows indeed. And if you look at the friends' lists, it's all the same people mostly. At least for my high school, incest rules.
There's even some goofy program where distinguished graduates of the high school receive some recognition. It lapsed a few years ago but apparently it means so much to some of these folks that they revived it. You'd have thought they'd raised the Titanic if you read the backslapping posts about that. Again, virtually the same seventy-five people or so are involved. I wonder whether, after every one of them receives the award, they go back to the first honorees and give them a second award. This could go on ad absurdum.
One of the funniest recurring themes to me was the inclusion on virtually everyone's friends list of the quarterback of the football team. He was liked by many I suppose, although he and I fell out because he went after me unfairly at a party (and I was the one drinking, not him. Go figure). Anyway, this doofus was good enough to play in the NFL for a time, although he was at best a journeyman with no hope of reaching Canton by election. Talk about a narcissist. He's skipped around the country since his career ended yet he needs to dredge up memories of his glory days from high school. Lest anyone think this is sour grapes or envy speaking, he was a student at our school for a whopping two years and left the area after graduation and never came back except for a visit. It's not like he has strong ties to the area. Karen raises the point that perhaps he just accepts every request he gets. Yeah, sure. That's why he ran for and won class president, was a quarterback, was homecoming king and has owned several businesses with his name plastered all over them. He's just an accomodating sort that one is.
I admit to curiosity about the members of our foursome with whom I ran around in high school, so I looked them up. Jeff, who had a near-parenthood experience our senior year, found religion and became a minister of some sort, a fact that FB confirms. Good for him. I figured he'd keep on the right path. Evan, who got busted at the Harvard of the South for using university WATTS lines, is now on the Left Coast doing something in finance. When I first pulled his name up, the internet offered me a choice to look up arrest records which, if true, would only be fitting.
The final member of our group, Jim, became a born-again Christian and disowned me when I politely refused to convert to his brand of Christianity. He was last seen in Texas during the oil boom of the '80s. He came back after we had our failed discussion/negotiation with his fiancée and introduced her to the rest of the gang but not me. As I learned from a minister in a documentary I saw on HBO about the country singer who came out of the closet, Chely Wright, Christians are never as mean as when they're mean for Jesus. Well, I hope Jim is doing well.
If someone were to reach out from high school and make a friends request, I'd delete it. I have no interest in going back there, figuratively or literally. To keep in touch with people who made no effort or who had no interest in my well-being simply so they can bump up their friends' list or lay claim to having unearthed a long-forgotten classmate holds no interest for me. I've often said that the only way I'd go to a reunion was dressed up as a waiter for the catering staff so I could eavesdrop on the others. I didn't have a great interest in most of them when I was in school with them and those in whom I had any interest apparently lost any interest in me.
They can have as a playground Facebook and the hometown in which many of them still live.
I've moved on.
(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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