The Thing About Facebook

My name is Ilina, and I'm a Facebookaholic.

I dream in status updates and live streams. I only recognize people by their avatars. I find my thumb unconsciously rolling the trackball on my Curve to read updates on the Facebook for Blackberry application that I downloaded, natch. I pore over photos and links and silly videos. I join causes and live chat and play Pathwords (damn you, Will, for hooking me!).

What really has me a bit freaked out is this whole connecting with long lost friends. Yeah, shut your pie hole, folks. I know that's precisely the point. It has me feeling slightly out of sorts, like I live in a parallel universe or something. I am a time traveler and don't recall a thing about the long, strange trip I took.

A bit of background, now keep up. My parents split up. I went to boarding school (my choice, not theirs). I changed schools. I changed schools again. All in all, I went to three high schools in four years (clearly couch fodder but seemed perfectly normal at the time). My parents moved out of my home town. I went to college. I moved to the midwest. I went to graduate school. I visited my home town precisely three times in 20 years, most recently just about three years ago.

You see, many of the people I have been reconnecting with on Facebook were boys and girls when I saw them last. Prepubescent. Innocent. Gawky. I myself was a tiny 4'8 peanut with scraggly hair and geeky tendencies. No self esteem, little confidence, lots of cluelessness. My boobs had not reached their full 32 DD. I shook like a spasming pork butt on the flexed arm hang and huffed and puffed my way around the track for the 600 yard dash (dash, my ass!). I was picked last in gym (no wonder) and faced the evil terror of Mr. Benfer, whose mother terrorized me in math class. I tell you, the Benfer family did not get Christmas goodies from this gal. Where was I? Oh, I was an 82 pound nothing with no athletic prowess, mutated social skills, and a nervous giggle, but I could conjugate the hell out of some verbs in Mrs. Robinson's English class.

Now here I am. A woman of 40. Wife. Mother. Business owner. Wannabe writer. Boobs reduced to a perfectly perky and pleasant 32 B. Yet that geeky little girl still shudders inside me and is about one rope climb away from wetting her pants. I thought I shed her since I lost track of all the people who knew her in the flesh rather than in the stories that I tell. And so she is real again. Watching from the inside out, unaccustomed to her usual view of outside looking in.

The boys and girls I knew then are men and women now. They shave. They're bald. They're fat. They're skinny. They make mortgage payments. They don't have a curfew. They've had sex...with mulitiple partners! They're parents, professsionals. They are on the cusp of a midlife crisis, astonishing considering they were on the edge of preteen angst last I saw them! Some moved to the tropics, some stayed in town. Now, they, and I, are people with a past. When we knew each other before we were people with a future.

I rediscovered the kids who came to my house to celebrate my 13th birthday. I reconnected with the guy I shared my music stand with in band (trombone, in case you were wondering). I found, and have been found by, crushes and heartbreakers and jerks. Instead of being in the cast of their tales, I am a voyeur, playing catch up to a life that went on without me.

I love hearing from these old friends and hope to weave them back into my life. There are so many that I've thought of fondly over the years and wondered how to get back in touch without it seeming creepy or stalkery. Facebook has not opened the proverbial Pandora's Box; it has opened doors, and windows in which I can catch a glimpse of my former self and what I've become. What we've become.

There is something special about Facebook. It is a warming, comforting feeling to get a friend request from someone long lost who touched me and shaped me. It's nice to know that I came across their radar, as they came across mine many, many times. And I would be lying if I didn't say I admit to overt joy when the I see the mean girls who aged very, very poorly (not naming names, of course).

So I haven't hit rock bottom yet. I'm going to keep bellying up to the Facebook bar. Now that we're all old enough to drink legally, I do hope my friends will join me.