Facebook: I Don't Get It

It's not the concept of Facebook that I don't understand. What I don't understand is some of the friend requests that I get. These are from people who either: A. I don't remember this person's existence in my life at all. (I have, on several occasions, asked the person to tell me how we know each other before adding him or her. It's embarrassing, yet the safety of my identity takes precedence. Yes, some whack jobs have attempted to do this to me before.) B. I know darned well that this person would not invite me to dinner, so why even bother? Are you trying to set a friends record like Tila Tequila did on MySpace? What's the point? We have lived very well without each other so far, so what's the need to squeeze into my life now that there is a finite number to indicate how many friends you have? Apparently, I am not the only person who feels this way, as I was once invited to a group that focused on this very complaint.

Truth be told, I could not give two licks about some of the people who have sent me friend requests. It's not that I dislike them, but rather that we don't have anything in common other than being of the human race. In the eight months that I have been a member and have collected something close to 150 "friends," only one person has rekindled a spark from the very distant past, a classmate that I graduated with. The funny part is that I sometimes talk about her when I am explaining the cultural phenomenon of Facebook, because she and I are developing a friendship now as adults, after many years of not even hearing each other's names. She is probably the one person who I know will be reading my blog regularly, because we discovered that writing is one of our shared passions. She knows who she is, because she is the one who brought me to BlogSpot.

But for the rest of you who send me friend requests because we had a political science class together in college, what gives? Bottom line: If you don't really care how I am doing, then don't request my friendship on Facebook. If you feel so compelled, just send me an e-mail asking me what I have been up to since 1983 when we last talked. Keep it real, y'all!