Hildegarde

So, yes, the Facebook thing-

I’m sort of with those people who don’t see the point, although it does seem to me that it might come in handy if you have to make a general announcement an want everybody to see, but for some reason can’t or don’t want to call them or e-mail them all individually.

And the way I first went to Facbook started like that.  My high school graduating class was having its 40th reunion, and I  was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to make it, or to make much of it. 

And the thing is,  I wanted to.  I know a lot of you think I had a God awful time in high school, mostly because of Somebody Else’s Music, but SEM is actually a reflection of what happened to me in junior high.  I actually had a kick ass time in high school.

Part of that was certainly the fact that my high school didn’t have much in common with your regular American public school.   There was a cheerleadin team, but I’m not sure what they cheered for–a boys’ school in the vicinity, I think–but nobody paid much attention to them.  

“Popular” in this place didn’t mean athletic, or cute, or any of the rest of it.  Since all the students were girls, it was usually pretty impossible to tell if anyone was dating at all, never mind if the date in question was “cool.”

So “popular” ended up being scholastically accomplished–it was comprised of the people who made the Honor societies (plural) and the people who got the highest SAT scores and the people who were most likely to end up in “name” colleges. 

It was the first place I’d ever been where a girls’ status depended on her brains and ambition, and it existed before there was anything like a feminist movement afoot in the land. 

Sometimes, reading through the comments here about how the English department was full of people who looked down on everybody and thought they were better than everybody else, I get a little frisson of recognition, but it’s not English departments I’m seeing.  

I did, in fact, know a lot of people, growing up, with the attitudes Robert ascribes to his English department, but none of them were in the English department, or involved intellectually in any way at all.

And part of me woners if the widespread distaste of academics for American middle class life might come from this–growing up in a world where just being smart was enough to earn you endless, sneering abuse.

But, like I said, my place was not like this, and I was interested in seeing people, and especially the people I’d been closest to.  Checking in with people you were once close to that you have not seen in forty years is an interesting exercise.

But as I got closer and closer to the time, it became more and more obvious that I wasn’t going to make it, or that if I did it was going to be for no more than a few hours at the end.  

Since some of the people who were organizing this were putting up information and notes on Facebook, I signed on to Facebook in order to see them, and I signed on under my birth name because that’s the name most of these people would remember me as. 

Or rather, they’d remember me by a nickname I hated beyond belief and got stuck with because my cousins also went to this school and wouldn’t call me anything else.  Or allow anyone else to call me anything else.

For what it’s worth, those same cousins still won’t call me anything else, and they go into paroxysms of snit whenever they remember that I didn’t change my name when  I married.

Paroxysms of snit.  That should be the title of something.

Anyway, once I got onto Facebook, all hell broke loose fairly quickly, and it sort of got worse by the day. 

Or maybe worse isn’t the word. More out of control by the day may be more like it.  For one thing, there are a lot of people out there who know a lot more about the names I might be going under than you’d think.   This resulted in my immediately getting “friend requests” for a gazillion people, which, you know was fine.  I’m a sociable sort if I don’t have to sit in a crowded room with people getting liquored up, and I was happy to have them.

Then here were the requests, which had to do with stuff like food fights, which I finally tried out the other day, and have no idea if I responded correctly.  I figure I’ll get back to that when I have a chance.

I did upload some photographs of the cats, nice ones taken by my friends Carol and  Richard when they were over one Sunday, because I’ve sort of decided to use the Facebook page for the happy-face stuff.  

But I also started looking around on Facebook as a sort of general thing, and I came up with some stuff that confuses me.

I understand this as a way to do general announcements, and to find people you haven’t seen in a long time but would like to get back in touch with, or to keep in touch with people you don’t get much of a chance to correspond with or see otherwise.

But the more I looked around, the more I realized that there are a fair number of people who use Facebook to communicate with people they see all the time.  And I do mean all the time.  

Could somebody explain this to me?  Why do you need to send messages through a Fac ebook page when you talk to that someone at least once a week, if not oftener?  There has to be something going on here I don’t get exactly. 

Okay, there’s a lot I don’t get.  I’ve already had to be rescued twice from accidentally subscribing to expensive silliness I had no idea–and still have no idea–how I got myself into.

But certainly there’s got to be something going on here that isn’t just about “communicating,” since some of these people were communicating just fine before Facebook came along.

And what is the difference, exactly, between Facebook and MySpace? 

Okay, I haven’t been to MySpace to check it out.  But it sounds the same when people describe it to me. 

Right.  Anyway.  Here we go again, Jane confronts popular culture and is confused.

But yesterday there was a story in the news about a guy who is suing a Vegas casino because he lost his shirt, which has got to be the ultimate “it’s not MY fault” story in the world.

And tomorrow I’ll get back to morality, the Humanities, and Nathaniel Hawthorne redux, since I’m reading The Blithedale Romance at the moment.