The Daily Procrastinator

I have, in the past, been accused of being quiet. When I worked at a dotcom in 2000, my boss referred to me as “the tall, quiet girl.” When I moved to a tech company in 2001, my then-manager worried that she might have hired a librarian. This is less the case now. Ever since leaving corporate America to become a full-time writer, I’m left with a certain conversational void in my life, a void that I’m largely unaware of until I get into a social situation and discover that I’m the overly chatty person who has inadvertently cornered someone and talked their ear off.

But this story is about back then. So there I was, giving all appearances of being a quiet bookworm. I had lived in the same place for about five years and had become good friends with the couple who lived next door. And then, in January 2005, I took a week-long cruise where I was unreachable. I returned to discover that my place had been completely ransacked over the course of seven days, leaving me with little more than some clothing and furniture scattered in random piles throughout the house.

My neighbors had discovered the break-in a couple of days before I returned home, and had called the police. The husband had accompanied the investigating officer inside in the hopes of being able to tell them what was gone, but the place was a such a disaster that it was hard to tell what remained and what didn’t. Every cabinet was emptied. Every drawer was overturned. He didn’t even know where to tell the police to begin.

But standing there in the bedroom, amidst piles of my belongings, everything changed. He spotted my red lace thong sitting on top of a pile. Gone was the image of the quiet bookworm. Now he had a different perspective, one that completely redefined the way he viewed me. Things have never been the same since. My simple presence in the room can make the poor man blush.

So let that be a lesson to you. No matter how well you think you know someone, there’s more to them than meets the eye.

There is no mistaking the serious weirdness of Facebook.  I’m all for connecting with my current friends, and even friends from my past, however estranged we may have become as a result of time and distance.  Even exes.  I’m so totally, completely fine with exes.  And the people I met senior year of high school when I started hanging out with the theater crowd and working the ticket booth on performance nights.  And even my college roommate that I more or less haven’t spoken to since we had that blowup fight sophomore year.  I’m cool with that.  I had some sort of connection with all of these people.

But what I still can’t seem to get over are the people from high school — the popular, student council, homecoming court kids — who acted as though I was invisible for four years.  Why on earth are these people sending me friend requests?  How do they even remember my name?  And if you couldn’t manage a “hello” during the four years we sat next to each other in homeroom, why on earth are you so interested in finding out what I’m up to now?

And they’re not just friending me.  They’re tagging me in all sorts of lists to find out what books I’ve read, or 25 random things about me, or whether or not I’ve ever been to jail.  I just can’t understand it.  Are they sitting there with a yearbook, searching for everyone alphabetically, regardless of relationship?  Do they have any memories of me whatsoever?  Does that guy remember turning me down flat when I asked him to the sophomore dance, telling me that he had “someone else in mind”?

For as infrequently as I think about high school, I also seem to have pretty distinct memories of it, and I just wonder if everyone else does, too.  I have no illusions that we’re the same people that we were at 15 or 18.  I’m certainly not the same shy, insecure girl that I was, and I don’t expect that anyone else reflects what they were then, either.

Maybe that’s the point of Facebook.  Maybe it doesn’t matter where you’ve come from or if you’ve lived parallel yet completely separate lives.  Maybe it exists to remind you of how far you’ve come, and help you to appreciate the value of the true friends you’ve made along the way.