Ach, Facebook

Facebook: you’re wearing me out. You’re making me re-live high school, which is at best unkind, at worst, deeply, deeply unwise. You’re making me have to think about people over whose memories I’d kicked enough dirt to render their names and faces one four-years-long blur. WHY are you bringing them up now?

It all seemed to be such a good idea at the time. Networking. Web bloody two-point-oh. Talking up my work, other people’s work, staying in touch with booksellers and librarians and teachers. And then, the first flung sheep came, followed by a myriad of pokes and SUPERpokes.

This is SO not me, Facebook.

Okay, so I limit the number of those squirrel applications, I outright ignore some fifty requests for bizarre actions (dancing food! pillow fights! movie quizzes!) and carefully agree to word games with selected people. And still the requests come, like battering waves against sandstone. And I FEEL GUILTY FOR SAYING NO.

YES. I am that dumb.

And now, a person from whom I haven’t heard a word in twenty years time has discovered me, and sent me a polite “remember me” and yes, I do, but unfortunately, I also remember me twenty years ago, and wouldn’t you guess it is that memory over which the most dirt has been kicked. To no avail.

Facebook, really: THANK YOU SO MUCH. I want to remember the geeky, awkward years. No, I do. Always.

So, of course I will friend this person, and each and every one of my high school classmates who seeks me out, every single person from summer camp, every random numpty with whom I ever had a pleasant nodding acquaintances. What else can I do? Facebook provides a whole new arena in which to reject people, and how can I be part of that? Thank you, Facebook: you’ve revived the ethical dilemmas which take me back straight to high school. And since I have nothing better to do than hear the minutiae of every single person’s life, and lift my cocoa to auld lang syne and all of that, I will gladly open the floodgates. I mean, what the heck, right? All these high school memories keep me young, right? Keep me in touch with the things that make great YA lit, right? It’s still all for my career, right?

Right???