MySpace

2007-02-09T15:41:00.000-08:00

I hate myspace.com. And Friendster too for that matter. I mean what happened to the good old fashioned way of losing touch with old classmates and acquaintances? Are we now measured by how many friends, testimonials and comments we have accrued on our myspace/friendster page? And how can someone really have over 1000 friends? How is that possible? The personality quizzes, the likes/dislikes lists and the display of pictures are embarrassing. Are we that starved for attention? Are we that lonely? Are we that bored? Are we that deluded to think that we have reached some level of famousness? Who cares what your eye color is or what member of Laguna Beach you are. And what the fuck is Laguna Beach? I’ll show my age…is it like 90210?
An old acquaintance of mine emailed me and said that I should put a picture of myself on my myspace page. She went on to suggest that I put one up of “my man,” (that’s what she said, “your man”). Oh dear. She wanted my current address to send me the information for our upcoming tenth high school reunion. I felt a surge of heat rush throughout my entire body. I had the beginnings of a headache. I wanted a cigarette. I quit for real the day before so I had to smoke the butts left in the ashtray. There were only nineteen butts in there. Where the hell was the twentieth? I had robbed myself of the twentieth. I don’t want to be done at nineteen. The number twenty on the box assured me one more. One more dammit. For Chrissakes. Forget about it. Walk away.
A fucking high school reunion! I mean, do we really do that? It just seems like an event created specifically for a “fall off your chair laughing” eighties movie. Why do we want to see each other again? All of us like that? If we wanted to continue to see each other wouldn’t we be doing that already? Wouldn’t we have an address book or an email account or a myspace page equipped with the resources to contact one other? Yes we would. We would meet for dinner occasionally. We would know what “her man” looks like. We would know his wife and the names of their children.
I can’t imagine wanting to go. When I hear from an old acquaintance I never feel good afterward. I feel reminded. Reminded of where we were that brought us to know one another. Reminded that we never really had anything in common in the first place. Reminded of how young I was, how silly I was, how odd I was. Then I think of how odd they were and how odd they sound now. It’s like we are trying to make it more meaningful than it really was. Like we are trying to carry each other over into our new lives and let‘s be honest, that just never works. It was nice. We had a fun time but it is over.
I am still the girl who was in the Drama Club and she is still the girl who was popular but not very pretty and he is still the guy who was really nice but still a big dork. And what are we up to now? We are going to work or hanging out. We are married or seeing someone or neither of the two. It’s nothing too spectacular or you would read about it in the newspaper or see it on television. We have learned some stuff or we have not. Maybe our hair has changed. The ones who were fat lost the weight and the ones who were skinny gained it. Some of us wear nicer clothes or make a lot of money and some of us just do not. I’m still irrational and he is still an idiot and you are still annoying. It just so happens that now these traits are exposed to our coworkers and significant others rather than our fellow classmates. We were silly then. We are silly now.
I want to change my phone number. Don’t get me wrong it’s not as if it is ringing off the hook anymore but the hangers on are killing me. I don’t want to hear their incessant meaningless blabber anymore.
I have got somebody who loves me that I just happen to adore in return. I have a beautiful life. I don’t feel the emotional need to package it in a new dress with “my man” by my side, and parade it about in an old gymnasium or a washed up hotel banquet room.
I have to stop visiting myspace pages.

In My Humble Opinion

MySpace