facebook

I have been a Facebook user for a year and a bit now. I was a Facebook holdout for a long time because I thought it was for teenagers who wanted to IM their friends. Even the term "social networking" sounded phony and plastic to me.

But then I joined and got suckered into the whole concept. I loved reconnecting with people that I hadn't seen in decades. Because we were living in Brazil at the time, I felt so much closer to people when I could read their status updates. You can really learn a lot about people by what they report. And some people feel the need to share the minutiae of their lives, so you really learn more than you ever wanted to know.

When I joined Facebook, I asked to friend the most central people in my life - those that I had frequent contact with, some in my email address book, friends from home, State Department friends from over the years, etc.

The thing with Facebook is that once you are friends with one person, other mutual friends see that and sometimes you get subsequent friend requests from those mutual friends.

Which opens a whole nasty can of worms.

I felt like I needed to confirm every friend request I received as long as I knew the person.

Or had some vague, distant recollection of them tucked away in the recesses of my overly-packed brain.

Jimmy, on the other hand, was more selective and told me I should be, too. To which I said, "I was nice to everybody in high school, so why in the world would I suddenly start picking and choosing who I was going to be nice to on Facebook?"

Now, some year and a bit later, I can say there's a large, extreme, humongous difference between being polite to people when you run into them at the grocery store and friending them on Facebook.

So I have started de-friending (or is it un-friending) people.

There are people who play this game called Mafia Wars on Facebook, which I find ridiculous, but can live with people who compulsively waste time on this game because we all waste time in our lives. Until one of them sends me a gun on my Facebook. Hellooooooo? I couldn't figure out how to get it off my page, even though I find it so offensive. I blocked the application so nobody else can send me a gun, and I immediately de-friended the guy.

And I've started de-friending people who make comments that I find socially or politically offensive. I feel really, really awful that I de-friended an older woman from my mother's church yesterday, but I'm tired of reading her political commentary. I get it that she's a staunch Republican and I can appreciate that she wants to share her views everyday, 12 times a day. I just don't need to read it anymore, so I hit that little "x" button by her name on my friend list.

I feel empowered.

If you're reading this and we're friends on Facebook, I promise I won't de-friend you. Because I love you. Just don't send me any guns.