I just responded to a come-on from my undergraduate university. I don’t usually do that. This time, it enticed me to sign up for the alumni magazine digitally. Well, why not? Sometimes I’m out with my kids, and I’m just feeling too good about myself. I get a few minutes to read, so I might as well bring myself down a few pegs. I read that my classmates are scaling mountains —
“Honey, please don’t spit at your friends!”
— curing cancer —
“I’m sorry guys, I just can’t be involved in your fight over who got to the swing first…”
— and advising the President, while I’m —
“Buddy, do you see that other children are playing? We’re at a playground to play, not to hang on your mother while she’s…”
…reading the alumni magazine. Now that I’m done, perhaps I’ll just toss my cellphone in the garbage and go live in a cave. That would be noteworthy, at least.
But maybe not. I log in to my account and see that they’ve enabled all sorts of new features. I can now be “friends” with people I never bothered to meet in the first place, or people I met and completely forgot about. Apparently, this is almost everyone. I got misty-eyed at seeing the name of a sweet young man who played piano beautifully, but largely, I got through the C’s and didn’t even recognize photos. Who are all these people? Is it possible that I only knew one person whose last name came before D? And some of them have signed on recently, as well. They’ve uploaded photos (so did I: at least I have a decent pub photo though it’s true that my son took it), listed their accomplishments, and connected with their friends on the site.
Friends, I thought. Well, most of my friends at school were in different years or in grad school, so I’m not going to find them on my class page. I could connect with the sweet young piano-playing man (who I can assume is now a middle-aged, sweet, piano-playing man), but it doesn’t look like he’s ever logged on. By the time I get to the C’s, my head is swimming with the names of all these people I spent so much time with — I may even have crashed my bike into them a few times! — and never got to know.
It also occurs to me that I could friend the famous people in my year, feigning ignorance of their accomplishments: “Hey, Po! So great to see you on here! Whatcha been up to all these years?”
But that would be crass, and besides, annoying famous people has never been my thing.
So instead, I retreat back to Facebook, where I actually know most of my friends, my blog, where I make new friends at an amazing rate, and to my kids. Right now they’re fighting about balloons —
“She dumped balloons ALL OVER MY ROOM!”
but I’m sure soon we’ll be a peaceful, happy family playing a boardgame and talking about how much we love each other.
And what bigger accomplishment is there than that?
