Downside to Optimism

Somebody I used to know, like really KNOW, has de-friended me on Facebook.
The strangest thing to me about the whole "eliminate your excessive friends" rag is not the idea that people grow far, far apart. I've known that for a long time. Kids, and then teenagers, and I guess your extremely stunted adult will sometimes have fights with former loved ones that end in "I don't want to be your friend anymore," and people leave lovers all the time. I know from my own experience on the latter front that no matter how you plan to cushion the words, other feelings and circumstances usually make the choice for you: people either work to stay together because they want to stay together or they don't. The point is, I don't think I'm naive about most relationships. They don't work very often, and this is why I love Annie Hall.

But doesn't there seem to be something awfully petty about removing someone from your Facebook world? That's a medium that operates a lot differently than an address book, or any kind of even slightly realistic simulation of basic human interaction: even if we're "friends on Facebook", I never have to talk to you. The only thing this relationship entitles me to is a look at your pictures, should I really want to experience your trip to Hawaii or your latest failed keg stand. Friends in this universe can ignore each other totally and completely, can even with-hold most information that Friends-in-real-life get on the first day. The bottom-line, the point, is vague invitations to parties I MAY attend (will not), and stale birthday wishes that are only valuable as stacked commodities and not really meaningful at all, because it's not like I remembered your birthday on my own. I guess it might feel nice to have so many buddies inviting you to online virtual reality games and sending "pokes" that you feel compelled to hack some of them away, but people You Used to Know, like Really Know, is supposedly what Facebook was designed for. So now I'm forced to contend with the harrowing possibility that not everyone I used to know wants to keep knowing me. Not even this technology that is for people who feel they are alone, made to pad memory and engorge past acquaintances into people worth remembering, can protect us from the things we've done or left undone, face to face, in real life. Computers, I think, are the worst friends in the world.

So what do I do now? I feel like whining. I feel like baking up a batch of Tollhouse cookies and driving over to my Used-To-Know's house (not that I remember where it is). I'm pretty sure that I'm one of those people unable to accept the fact that not everyone will always like her (or should, for that matter). Being liked is like a drug, and it explains more or less all of my terrible behavior towards anyone, ever. I think the world tends to operate better when people are civil, but curiously almost everyone I respect has a Devil May Care kind of streak that gets them what they want, that enables them to rise above the fear that not everyone will understand. There's a reason for choosiness, because the world is a little too big to swallow whole. These people don't look backwards, so much. They tend to be less in touch with a lot of high-school friends. I wonder what that might have to do with having this power to preen your memories, or if its even at all related to my former friend, who may honestly be reacting to the pretty crappy way I treated him after a date and three five hour phone calls. Can you, should you, be able to select who shapes you? When people disappear from your life, is there a point when you should simply allow them to be gone forever? That just seems like death, to me. I don't always understand why certain things need to be said out loud, I don't always understand why it helps to slap on labels or love (which are in this case the same thing) or take them away.

Logically, don't I always have the potential to be everything, always, because I make very few choices? Couldn't we still go on a second date, even, and maybe this time we'd see a better movie and you'd have spent a brief but life-changing month in rehab and gotten a cap for that front tooth and I wouldn't be so worried about running into people we know? We might have gone to Asian Bistro instead of Noodles and Co, you might have driven me home, I might have let you kiss me because there wouldn't have been -- and wasn't then, but now I know better -- anything to lose?