A Facebook Milestone

I have cracked the 100-Friends barrier on Facebook.

It took a long time for Kim to convince me to join Facebook last year. I had a phone. I had email. I do not text, twitter or send smoke signals. What did I want to get on Facebook for? But eventually it sounded like it might be fun, so I agreed to try it.

And now I am an addict.

Oh, it's not a complete addiction. I have never seen much point to all of the various games that go around - Mafia Wars, Farmville, Kidnapping and so on. Even if I tried those, I suspect I wouldn't last very long on them.  I have a defective video game gene.  It's on the same chromosome as the handyman gene, the outdoorsman gene, the car gene, and the gene that allows you to take seriously anyone who uses business metaphors in casual speech.  Someday there will be a cure for this condition, and when that happens I will do my best to avoid it.

But I do so love the various memes that go around Facebook, asking you goofy questions so you can post the answers for all to see. They appeal to both my exhibitionist streak - hey, I write a blog; let me tell you about myself in detail - and my curiosity about other people. Most people are more interesting than they seem at first glance, and one of the things I miss most from college is the ability to hang out with friends until the wee hours of the morning discovering that all over again. And now, thanks to Facebook, I can do pretty much just that.

I have also found, lurking in the recesses of Facebook, a lot of people I had lost - people I had wondered about but had not actively gotten off my duff to track down. There they were! In fact, it seems that for many of my friends, that's all the "there" they are - Facebook is pretty much the only way I hear from them. And they me, I suppose. It beats not hearing from them.

It does take up a lot of time that might otherwise be put to productive use. Oddly, I have no problem with that. Productivity is over-rated. As long as what needs to be done gets done, that's all that needs to be done. The rest of the day is mine.

As I cruised through other people's pages, I noted that most of them had more friends listed than I did and at first I thought that was something I needed to correct. Don't I have friends? I'm sure I do! They're around somewhere. And I searched around for people to friend (okay - one downside of Facebook is that "friend" has become a verb and "unfriend" has become a word at all, but that is another rant) until it hit me that this was a perfectly absurd thing to do.

If I had to make a serious effort to recall names to search for, what would I possibly have to say to anyone I found that way?

So I stopped.

If I came across people I wanted to add to the list, I would do so. But otherwise, I didn't worry about it. I accepted friend requests from people I knew or remembered fondly, and rejected them from people I didn't remember at all - there were a lot of those, oddly enough.

And now I'm at 100.

I suppose there should be some sort of celebration of this milestone, but for the life of me I can't figure out what that ought to be. Perhaps I will have a cup of tea and bask in the fact that there are a hundred people who think enough of me to have me on their list too.