WHY I HATE FACEBOOK

I hate Facebook. There, I said it. I hate Facebook. And here’s why: One day a friend of mine emailed me to say “You have to get on Facebook, everyone is on it because there is a 20 year high school reunion group and you have to be on it.” She then extolled the virtues of this great meeting/reuniting website and how “it is so fun to catch up with people.” And it was fun…for the first month. It was great catching up with her. We even got together for a drink and brought our old yearbooks and wondered about everyone and what they were up too. Then I found myself adding friends to my list of friends and then spending time looking over their profiles and pictures and checking out their friends and their friends’ friends and then trying to see if anyone knows anyone famous. After my kids begged me for a while to make them lunch, I decided after hours and hours on facebook, time to log off, reluctantly. The next day I checked my email and I had felt like I had been invited to a great high school party with the cool kids. I thought wow, this is pretty neat having all these friends, some of them I really don’t even know but what the heck.

Then one day my BFF, Hailey, who is also on Facebook, mentioned to me that Sherry Klein was on Facebook. (IMAGINE BIG THUD SOUND RIGHT HERE!) “Remember her?” she asked. “REMEMBER HER? REMEMBER HER?” How could I ever forget her but all I could mutter was a measly ‘oh yeah, I remember her’ as if she was some vacant memory in my brain that I had not accessed in a while, which I hadn’t, till I heard her name again. Sherry Klein, with her 5000 friends, is why I hate Facebook.

Now you need a little backstory. Sherry Klein was the girl that seemed to have everything in grade school and I was insanely jealous of her. She was blonde, beautiful, funny, rich and of course skinny and I was dirty blonde, pimple faced, fat and lower income. Basically she looked like a Barbie and I looked like a boy. Really, a few weeks ago my kids saw a 5th grade softball picture of me and they asked if it was a picture of my brother. I don’t even have a brother. Sherry had beautiful long blonde hair and I had a short “convenient for my mom” feathery bowl cut thing, I truly don’t know how to describe it. But I longed for long hair. I wanted to put my hair in pony tails and braids so bad and I never could. Sherry’s whole family was great looking, her mom and dad were just the picture of health and beauty. And they were married. My parents were divorced. She had a swimming pool. I had sprinklers. She had great clothes and while I did not have to wear Goodwill clothes, they were not as cute or as expensive as hers. Let’s see, what else, oh yeah, she got to kiss Tom Speel. I didn’t. Tom Speel was THE babe of our school, everyone wanted to “go out” with him. I don’t even know what that means at 12 but Lord knows I was not going out with him. But I loved him so much (as much as a 12 year old can love another 12 year old). I would daydream about having my first kiss with him but no, that’s another thing that Sherry got. And right in front of me too. Did she not notice my jealousy? How could she be blessed and have everything and me be such a loser? Did I mention that she then went on to become extremely popular in junior high and high school and win all sorts of excellence awards for school, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, back to my story. So hearing the name Sherry Klein just brought back all the insecurities and negative feelings of my youth flooding back into my brain. I thought when high school was over that I would never feel this way again. I would never worry about being one of the popular people, one of the pretty girls, about being invited to the best parties and hanging out with the cool kids and knowing the cool kids.

So I thought the only rational thing to do is to add her as a friend and be the adult in the situation. I mean, I know that she is getting the pop ups on the right side that say my name just as I was getting the pop ups that say her name so I thought I would show her I was not jealous of her by adding her as my friend first. And I did with a little note asking how she has been since it had been so long since I talked to her and hoping all is going great with her. And then I waited. And then I opened my email and I got excited for a minute because she added me as a friend so I felt validated and cool but then wait, where was her reply to my questions???? She obviously got them. So what the heck does that mean?? A pity add. She added me to her list of friends out of pity. That’s worse than ignoring my friend request. So there I am feeling like a loser and realizing that she pity added me to her list of friends. She obviously didn’t want to add me but I think it was easier to add me and ignore me than to not add me at all. So now I am left a little lower than where I started, kind of like grade school. And that, my friends, is why I hate facebook. But if you want to add me as your friend, my online ID is blahblahblah..

P.S. Names have been changed to protect the author from utter and total humiliation!