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I confess to joining Facebook–at my sister-in-law Nancy’s urging late last winter–with no real plans to use it. My thinking was: I’m already challenged enough when it comes to keeping up with friends by phone and email; Why would I ever want to complicate my life with one more tool?
But then, I began to receive a few isolated reminders from Facebook asking me to confirm a friendship or two. And so I did, mostly to be polite. But now, based on the last few weeks, my days of isolation could soon be over, as more and more of my past is catching up with me. While most are friends from Texas, a few date back to my high school years. And I confess to being pretty wowed at the power of this tool that can re-connect me with people I’ve almost forgotten.
Most of my Facebook friends are extroverts. It looks like about half are serious about it. And a few have confessed to being addicted in some form or fashion. By looking at the grafitti left behind on my wall, they may be right.
I like to write though I’ve not yet written on any walls. Not even my own. No surprises here. I’ve always been a bit of a wallflower. If you were to spot me at a party, that’s where you’d find me: holding up some wall. And it’s no different in Facebook. I respond as people buzz over or buzz by, if they call me by name. But being the introvert I am, it will take me a while to work up to writing on walls.
Facebook walls are one big digital party. My wall reveals idle chitchat as well as a few mixed digital drinks and games. I received my first digital drink about a month ago. And because of the chitchat…I feel more like a next door neighbor to some friends who wrote on my wall to tell me that they were on their way out the door to mow their yards. Before Facebook, I would have never known people cared when I mowed the yard.
But to be honest, rather than chitchat about yardwork or whatever, I’d much rather curl up on a couch with a good freind or two and just listen to their lives. But these days, few have the time or even the desire for meaningful conversation. I guess they’d rather ‘work’ a room, even if it’s an internet room with iconic faces. And I ask, does working a party sound like fun? Not to this introvert. In fact, working a party sounds like an oxymoron.
My extrovert brother Jon joined Facebook earlier this week. Already he has over two hundred friends. Driving down to see Daddy on Wednesday, we laughed about the fact that I had only gathered twenty friends with six months work. And it is work. I was never good at networking. My lack of networking skills was just one of the reasons I found it easy to leave the ranks of accounting management for the greener pastures of retirement.
So what does retirement look like, according to my Facebook profile? Reading and writing and no arithmetic. And while it’s a ‘no’ to arithmetic for now, my wallflower of a CPA certificate is still hanging out on my basement wall. Just in case. And just in case anyone out there in the middle of the electronic room is interested, I mowed my neighbor’s yard this morning. 🙂
an everyday life 
I picked up Nora Ephron’s “Wallflower at the Orgy” a few months ago and finally began to read it last week while I waited for Mom in the dentist’s office. The first lines of the intro read thusly:
“Some years ago, the man I am married to told me he had always had a mad desire to go to an orgy. Why on earth, I asked. Why not, he said. Because, I replied, it would be just like the dances at the YMCA I went to in the seventh grade – only instead of people walking past me and rejecting me, they would be stepping over my naked body and rejecting me…”
She goes on to compare the life of journalist to that of the wallflower at the orgy – watching everyone else having a marvelous time doing every sort of indescribable and undescribable thing while she stands on the side and takes notes.
It’s the first thing that came to mind when I read your post, above. Yes, I “belong” to Facebook, because I was told I really should. Likewise Twitter, although not MySpace. But in many respects both seem to me like cyber-versions of Ephron’s orgy, and I’m a wallflower by choice at the FB gathering.
One issue I’ve become acutely aware of is the amount of time that can be frittered away at Twitter, FB, chatrooms and blogs. By the time I’ve written my own essays, responded to comments and then left my own response at blogs I enjoy reading, time’s a-wastin’! It can take hours.
To move on at that point to FB and really participate would mean cutting things out of my life like laundry, grocery shopping and plant tending.
Priorities, priorities… Besides, the obsessive counting of friends on FB is like counting blog hits. Often, one good comment is worth 10,000 hits, and one real friend is worth 10,000 FB friends. That’s my old-fasioned view, anyhow.
You’re choice of the number 10,000 hit home, as in… ‘When we’ve been here 10,000 years…’
So to your comment to Wallflower, I say: “Amen, sister”.
And as to your own recent writings… off of the FB walls…I say: I loved your little parable of a post about the cactus competition… or was it inspiration? Do you ever submit your posts for publication? They are so well crafted, so thoughtful. And here’s a word: Inspirtational. Just a bit of Amazing Grace.