Sayonara, facebook!

A month or two ago, facebook sent me an email saying they were rolling out a new feature. I didn't really care, except that they mentioned this new feature would involve making even more of my information public, so I went through about a million passwords, logged in, and deleted four of the five or six things I still had on my page.

Then I noticed, on the new "timeline" feature, that a handful of people had left messages on my last birthday. These included people who had made my life so horrible in high school that I'd had to sneak into the library senior year just to eat my lunch in peace. One had even written, "Facebook is telling me to tell you happy birthday." Just like that. Why did she fucking bother? And why was I "friends" with her on facebook anyway? I let it all be for a few weeks, and then, with my next birthday fast approaching, I decided to delete my account.

I shouldn't have had a facebook page in the first place. From the beginning, the service was promoted as a social network for "your real-life friends". If you've been following me on twitter for more than five minutes, you might be aware that I haven't had any "real-life" friends since college, and the friendships I had then and before didn't last. I think I made the page (in 2008 maybe?) for two reasons: 1) just in case some boy from college (class of 2006) or my study-abroad trip to Italy (2005) suddenly realized (several years later) that I was the ONLY girl for him EVER and he NEEDED to contact me and tell me so IMMEDIATELY, and 2) so I could see how many of the girls I went to high school with had gotten married and/or had babies (answer: they are all married and/or have babies).

I wasn't even going to friend anybody, but I made the mistake of entering my high school's name, and, over time, a few dozen requests rolled in. (I didn't send any requests of my own.) It turned out that to see some people's wedding and/or baby pictures, you had to be "friends" with them, so I accepted most of the requests. There was also a girl from middle school who had been bullied a lot and to whom I had gone out of my way to be nice since she only seemed a little weird and misunderstood (like me) and not as bad as everyone was making her out to be. I think I actually thought, "I'd better "friend" her so she doesn't feel bad." That turned out to be an interesting one. Her photo page was literally dozens of professionally-made portraits... of herself. You know how if you're planning to be an actress, you go out and "get some headshots done"? It looked like she had done this every six months for the past several years, then uploaded every single photo to facebook.

But for the most part, facebook was the opposite of interesting. I guess I don't have to tell you this, but it's people sharing recipes and going on about the crappy music they like, pretending they've completely forgotten about the time they put a yearbook in your lap and made you point out the handful of guys you LIKE-liked and then went right out and fucked them all so that none of them would ever even look at you again. But I digress.

Or maybe I don't digress. Maybe the very most maddening thing about facebook is that absolutely everyone you connect with is a "friend". There's no accounting for the shades of jealousy and hatred and superiority and disgust and annoyance that color nearly every human interaction. It's not just phony that everyone on facebook pretends like everything is always going great--it's phony that we're even there in the first place. (Like I said, I shouldn't have been on facebook.) High school graduation was one of the happiest days of my life, not because I felt I'd made any great accomplishment, but because I knew would NEVER HAVE TO SEE ANY OF THOSE PEOPLE EVER AGAIN. Yet here I was, choosing to see "those" people.

And what about the people I didn't choose to see? When I deleted my account on Saturday, I had a backlog of eight unconfirmed (and mostly inexplicable) friend requests. They were from:

1. a girl who had roomed with me in college for just a few months. I think that's "enough said"--I won't detail the horrible situations she dragged me into, or the disrespectful things she said to me, or the messes she left behind (that required three Mr. Clean Magic Erasers and over a dozen man hours to clean up, just so I could get my deposit back).

2. a boy from high school who whined constantly (and to some extent, with good reason) about how "no one" accepted him because he was gay, even though he was one of the most popular kids in the school.  Also, we were in a musical together (I played viola in the pit, he was one of the leads), and he kept going on and on to me one day about how I couldn't possibly understand the pressure of performing or the amount of preparation he had had to put into his role, even though (according to himself) he had one of the best voices he had ever heard. (Also, I once overheard him tell someone I smelled bad. The school building had a major air intake next to a sewage exhaust pipe, but he decided it would be cute to blame the whole smelly situation on me. Thanks.)

3. a middle school English teacher who, for an intensive project with lots of analysis and writing to be done, recommended a particular book to me saying, "On a scale of 1 to 10, this is, like, a 14, oh my gosh it is so good!" It turned out to be a cheap fantasy fiction paperback, the single most poorly-written book I've ever read all the way through, and I still had to do all that work on it because I had "committed to it". (Also, she used to mock me in class regularly for being messy and shy.)

4. someone I recognized only by name. The "friends" I had in high school weren't very interested in introducing me to their other friends, but apparently this one had heard my name like I'd heard hers. Or maybe facebook did the mutual friends recommendation thing, and she was like, "Whatever, okay."

5. a boy who was expelled for threatening me with a large knife.

6. a relative who once tried to have me disinherited, even though I was, at that time, for 8+ hours per day, PHYSICALLY CARING FOR THE PERSON IN CHARGE OF THE ESTATE. My mom says she was mad that I'd gotten such a high SAT score, yet had refused to tutor her daughter (over the phone). Mostly, though, she just wanted the money for herself (because a 3,600-square-foot house on a five-acre wooded lot and three (or more?) luxury cars isn't enough).

7. a high school English teacher who was actually kind of cool, but in whose class I met a boy with whom I was fast becoming friends and maybe even starting to LIKE-like when he suddenly and unexpectedly died. Yes, let's reminisce about that.

8. a boy who was a real twerp in 4th grade, but okay after that. Actually, I ran into him a couple years ago, and he was very nice to me. I probably could have confirmed that one. Oops. Okay, this time I'M the bad one. OH! I just remembered! He was the person who taught me how sex works! (Yes, everyone was wearing clothes, and no, I didn't "get it" until he explained it to me--I was eight or nine years old.)

Before I deleted my page, I glanced through a few people's profiles just to make sure I wanted to leave. It was all very same old, same old: "I'm more successful than you!" "I love my family more!" "I take better vacations!" "I go to more and better concerts!" Then I ended up on the page of that girl from middle school... the one with all the pictures of herself. I'd run into her "in real life" a couple of years ago... actually, she had seen me out walking and called me over. She was very polished-looking, with a big smile (and fancy makeup, fancy hair, fancy dress, fancy shoes). I complimented her handbag, and she said it was a [very expensive designer] handbag that her fiance had gotten her as an anniversary present because he liked to buy her nice things--she just couldn't stop him! And he had so much money, so why bother trying! And she went on and on about how great her life was. I finally had to say, "Well, facebook me!" while walking away. Looking at her page the other day, I noticed she had given up on acting and singing and had taken up politics. Hard right politics. Among her many political "likes" were the NRA (okay, whatever), and THE CAMPAIGN TO REELECT SCOTT WALKER (smh, smh, smh). For years, I'd thought, "I was nice to this girl when no one else was. I did the right thing!" But it turns out I had wasted my efforts on someone who would eventually become more repugnant to me than she was to all those kids in middle school. And if I'd never been on facebook, I never would have known.