Years ago I received an email from a good friend who had moved away to a place I rarely have the pleasure of visiting - Prince Edward County. It was an email via facebook, telling me if I wanted to see Jen's photos I had to click here, do this, do that, and voila I'd be face to face with images of my gorgeous friend and her two beautiful sons.
That was how I ended up on facebook.
Soon I was hooked. I love to write, keep in touch, be kept-in-touch-with (don't tell my English teacher I dangled that one in front of you), share photos and otherwise be part of what's going on with the folks I care about. So I began checking and posting to facebook daily. Then frequently. Then constantly.
So that whether I planted tulip bulbs that nasty squirrels devoured, or if my daughter Rachel said something particularly clever, I would post something pithy to my status. Sometimes I would just post the words "something pithy", and chuckle to myself. Something pithy. Ha ha, I wrote something pithy! What a clever status update!
Yeah, I was that guy.
Facebook was fun. I sent out friend requests, and received them now and then too. And after a few years, I had 100 facebook friends. Most were human. One was a citrus fruit by the name of Orange, whom I'd never met. These were good times, indeed.
And over the years I used facebook to connect with some terrific people. I got to know my Calgarian cousins, Karen and Lori, and watch them grow up into the amazing young women they are today. Hard to believe we share chromosomes because these girls are so much more fun, sportier and more upbeat than I've ever been. I also mingled in the old Ottawa high-school network through a lovely long-lost friend, Loanne, who had always been super-cool, yet super-kind to me when we were young, despite the fact that I was super-awkward, even back then. And, incredibly, I met Barb (more about her some other time), one of the nicest things ever to happen to me.
But then, one day, I noticed I was no longer in the triple-digits in the facebook friend department. Somehow I only had 99 friends.
I would scroll through the 99 names, trying to figure out who was missing. I couldn't come up with the answer.
At about the same time, in my real life, a very good human friend named Frieda with whom I would visit just about every week, started falling off my social calendar. She was really busy, or sick, or away, or busy, or sick or her kid was sick, or away ... and I believed all that ... until of course I didn't.
I looked on my list of facebook friends to see if I could find her husband, Devan, who held their facebook account.
Nope. No more Devan. He was no longer my facebook friend. That mystery was now solved. But it generated a new one. WHY? What could possibly be the reason he would end our facebook friendship? And why was Frieda seeming to end our real one?
I looked at the calendar on my fridge to check when our most recent real-life interactions had taken place. Months had passed since I'd seen Frieda. That wasn't good. I had to connect with her and lay it all out for discussion the old fashioned way: on the telephone.
As it turned out, I discovered from the phone conversation, I had offended my friend's husband on facebook, and they weren't getting over it.
"He says you're not welcome in our home anymore, Dana." said my friend whose children had grown up with mine.
What did I say to offend him?
"You called him a pervert."
But, I explained, Devan had commented on the photo of my blond highlights saying "I hope the carpet matches the drapes". So I typed back that he was a creepy pervert. I said some other things too. It was so over-the-top. I guess on facebook he couldn't tell, but it was a JOKE.
"Well, there's truth in every joke, and we believe you think he's a pervert."
Actually, I do think he's a pervert. Some of my best friends are perverts. I've always thought he was crude - especially with all the silly perverted emails he would send of German girls bent over the chalet railing with no panties under their dirndls ... but his perversion didn't stop me from liking him ...
"I'm sorry, Dana, but that's how it is and there's nothing I can do."
And there it was. My real-life friendship, a friendship in which babies were born, parents had died, and childhood cancer had been diagnosed ... a friendship that started before Mark Zuckerberg hammered out his first line of facebook code ... a friendship that I had clearly taken for granted ... was officially over.
I haven't laid eyes on Frieda or Devan - or their statuses - ever since. Plus, in real life, they've sold their home and moved out of town.
That story isn't the only reason I quit facebook. Yes, I ended up quitting facebook after that. The other reason I quit facebook was that it helped me reunite with this guy (http://www.examiner.com/article/local-spiritual-leader-says-dire-2012-predictions-wrong-part-1-of-3 ), a handsome fella I had idolized since I was a young camp counsellor where we worked with learning disabled children, years ago.
I had the world's biggest crush on him that never really went away. One day, through his facebook invitation, my mom and I went to hear him speak about positive thinking and spirituality. He said he was a trans-channeler for the angels, which should have tipped me off, but it didn't. Seeing him at the front of the small audience of folks in search of positive thinking ... and watching him pretend - or believe - to channel the voice of the archangel Michael ... all I can say is it was one of the strangest, most bewildering and disappointing experiences I have ever had.
Within 48 hours of leaving that "seminar", I found myself in my living room huddled over the laptop, cancelling my facebook account altogether. Facebook doesn't make it easy, either. It can take a long time to go through the process of clicking this and deleting that ... much longer than it takes to join ... and even then you're not really out of their clutches. They email you several times to remind you that it's not too late to resurrect the account, which is still there waiting for you, despite your requests to close it.
I still remember the very last thing I wrote as a member of facebook, to their query about why I was leaving. I actually typed this not-very-pithy but rather desperate-sounding statement: "facebook, please, just leave me alone".
After all these years, I actually forgive facebook for all these icky events that happened. It's all just a big misunderstanding, isn't it? I wish I could just sprinkle forgiveness-juice around and make Frieda my friend again and absolve everyone of their facebook sins, once and for all.
Except for the part where my old crush stood in front of a paying audience and "channeled angels". That was unforgivable.
And that's the story of how facebook and I broke up ... and why despite all the good times we shared together ... we can never be friends.
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