Fun with Facebook

No, I haven't joined Facebook, don't get excited. I'm still holding fast to my refusal to get involved. I just think it's so dumb! I realize that Facebook and Twitter have been used to bring the world together, helped facilitate the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street and all that, and that's wonderful, but Facebook is still really really dumb and I don't want to do it. Someday if I ever publish anything for real I'm going to HAVE to go on Facebook, because that's what authors do these days, and that's reason enough just to keep all my manuscripts locked in a drawer forevermore.

Rocket Boy feels the same way I do about FB, with one exception: he's on it. He almost never checks in, maybe every 3 months or so, so when he does, it's a marathon session, all that catching up to do. He puzzles over the "friend" requests -- "Who is so-and-so?" -- but accepts them all dutifully. Since he never posts anything on FB, no one gets anything out of being his friend.

Rocket Boy has a second cousin in Germany with whom he's very close, Andreas, and Andreas has two children, now young adults really -- I think they're 21 and 15. And of course they're both on Facebook. So Rocket Boy likes to check in on them, since he's sort of their uncle. (They're the twins' 3rd cousins -- isn't that an odd thought?)

Tonight he found a posting from Julia, the 15-year-old (who was a flower girl at our wedding, when she was 6), and after laboriously translating her slangy, abbreviated German, decided that she was getting something pierced! And whatever it was, her mother was not allowing her to "stretch" it, and Julia was angry about that. We worried for a while about what body part she might be putting a hole in (remember, this is our FLOWER GIRL we're talking about), but then RB found a response post from a friend of hers asking "Wie ist das Ohr?" so fortunately it was her ear. Rocket Boy posted a message in response, something brilliant like "Are you getting something pierced?" (in German, so who knows whether that's what it really says) and we had a good laugh over how that's going to go over with Julia, not to mention her friends. Like a lead balloon.

Then RB checked in with Julia's older brother Sebastian, with whom he has more of a relationship (i.e., they email each other twice a year). On Sebastian's Wall (am I using the terms right? I'm so out of it), he had posted that he had visited, mm, something called a Kinky Discotheque? We were quite shocked -- I know, he's an adult, but the last time we saw him he was 12 or 13. And then, here's the kicker, it said "3 people Like this." Oh stupid Facebook. Then something popped up, some young woman had just become Sebastian's friend and the box seemed to be indicating that Rocket Boy might want to be her friend too, because they had a mutual friend in Sebastian. "Should I click on it?" Rocket Boy asked me. "Ha ha ha," I replied politely.

Rocket Boy said to me, didn't you do things like that when you were their age? And I said, of course I did, but I didn't POST vivid descriptions of what I did in places where my UNCLES could read them! Keep in mind that both Julia and Sebastian ASKED Rocket Boy to be their friend. Or should that be Friend?

We figure after that dumb message to Julia, she's going to unFriend him.

I'm still not signing up.