I hate Facebook.01:09 Oct 29 2010
Times Read: 753
I knew as soon as my new sister in law wanted me to sign up, claiming that it would be easier for all of us to coordinate family get-togethers and what not, that I was going to be sorry.
And I was right.
I have been inundated with "Help me with my Farmville", "Sign my petition", "Join my group", "Send me a smile, jelly bean, drink, etc." ad nauseum. I usually just delete or ignore most of them, cause I don't have the time to devote to building a hen house, bulking up somebody's group, or screaming for a cause. I would much rather spend my time here, where I have friends I know and actually talk to, and where it doesn't involve downloading a MULTITUDE of applications to keep in touch. Facebook is more complicated than anything I have ever fooled with, and I ain't the most computer literate person in the world. I didn't even sit down at a computer until I was in my late thirties, something I have mentioned lots of times in various entries here. So I'm a late bloomer. When everybody else was taking computer classes, I was slaving away in art classes. What a shame that years later, I learned that I could incorporate my artistic talents with the computer age.....lol.
After I signed up for Facebook at Kristy's request, it was ok for a bit. I had my new family on my list, we could coordinate things together, and all my wedding pictures went up for the far flung in our family to see. I would answer the occasional request for "send me a kiss" or whatever, and it was ok.
Then some of my friends on here started logging in, and I added them too. The requests for the various applications got heavier, but they understood my schedule when I told them I didn't have time for that kind of thing, and life went on.
Then some of my friends from other sites that I used to talk to wanted to add me, and I agreed to that. I had talked to them before, the site we met on no longer existed as I had known it (Audiogalaxy became Rhapsody, and the rest is history) so it was just a continuation of what we had there. I eventually deleted my MySpace account, because I was never there.
I was always here, like a good little vampire...lol
Then the inevitable started.
The people I went to high school with found me.
Fuck.
Suddenly I had all these people who wanted to "be my friend", "Join the graduates of First Presbyterian School", yadda yadda yadda.
People who at best wouldn't give me the time of DAY when we were in high school, and at worst bullied me and picked on me, suddenly wanted to be my BFF and have me help them build pig pens, and what not.
So let me get this straight. For 4 years you wouldn't even SPEAK to me, and NOW you want to be my best friend???
I don't fucking think so, pardon my French...
Girls who teased me unmercifully about my weight, my glasses, my braces, my less than stellar wardrobe suddenly wanted to trade secrets. Don't get me wrong- some of my best friends in high school also cropped up, and I am glad to have them back in my life, but damn.
Guys who wouldn't spare me a second glance suddenly wanted to pop up and tell me I'm hot, how's it going, am I coming to the 30th reunion (yes, I really am that old)....(and no, I didn't)
So, I take it with a grain of sand. In this day and age, you're either connected and take the good with the bad, or you live in a bunker in the middle of Butt Fuck, Montana and talk to goats. All things have a light and a dark side, just like the Force and duct tape.
Then on Tuesday, all that complacency blew up in my face.
When I was 18, I decided to take a break from college. I had worked with my dad for a year, and I decided I wanted to take a trip. Alone.
My mother was less than thrilled. But then again, my mother was from a time where women simply didn't throw a bag in their car and take off alone. It just wasn't heard of. But what the hell. I never was one to do things exactly the way my mom, or anyone else, did.
Part one of the trip was to go see a friend of mine graduate from college for the first time- she managed to earn herself several degrees at three different colleges, and we were very close. And yes, she has as low an opinion of Facebook as I do...lol. So after work, I loaded up the car, and headed to Spartanburg, SC, to see her, party with her and her friends, and just in general relax and find some space of my own. That was about 4 days of a two week, give or take, trip.
After all the partying, on Sunday I decided to head to Gadsden, Alabama to spend some time with my maternal grandmother. I needed to be old fashioned mothered, and she was the optimum choice for said experiment. Of course, again my mom didn't appreciate that worth a damn, because she had always thought her mother was "ignorant" and "unyielding" because all they ever did was fight.
Funny, all my mom and I ever did was fight too...go figure....
And I think it pissed my mom off alot that grandmama and I got along when I was a teenager, when she didn't. Such is life.
So off I went, driving across three states, landing at grandma's house (and yes, while I did go over the river, there were few woods, but alot of mountains...lol).
I got there, Grandma Ann took good care of me, fed me monster amounts of her home cooking, we went to church together, went shopping together, I had hours of time to do needlework, and just relax in the slow moving, old fashioned environment that was Gadsden at the time. I visited relatives with her, cooked with her, and just in general relaxed some more. The only issue I had was with my uncle (mom's brother). He would come over to eat because he was too fucking lazy to get a job and put food in his own house (which he didn't have to pay for because he had wrangled it out of Grandma after Grandaddy died). He would be shovelling food into his mouth with one hand, and waving a bible at me with the other, telling me I had to get right with God.
Lovely. But thankfully his visits were short, and I was after all bigger and stronger than he was, so I wasn't worried too much.
While I was there, I also spent some time with my cousin Debbie. She was a year younger than I was, a senior in high school, and had a monstrous crush on this guy in her class. She also thought I was the living end, because I was in college, AND I had a car, AND I was old enough to drink legally at the time. So when she finally worked up the courage to ask this guy out, she asked if she could borrow my car (I had a burgandy buick regal, her mom had a volkswagon bug- do the math) and if I would buy her a six pack of beer to take with them.
I was an idiot, and I wanted to be her best friend. What can I say. I also had issues with self confidence....and feeling like the cool older cousin was great for my ego.
Besides, I had found out, through Debbie, that a guy that had been 2 years ahead of me in high school was not only living there, but had asked about me. And he and I had a date, and he was picking me up, so what the hell. Everybody was going out to have a good time.
My date went well, we talked alot about high school and what not, but there wasn't any spark or chemistry or hoopty or whatever you kids call it these days. I just wasn't feeling him, ya know? So we parted company, I went inside, and the next morning, Debbie came by to drop off the car.
She was ecstatic. She thought she had made a good impression on her man, what with the beer and the classy car, et al, and she was sure everything was paved all the way to the altar. At 17, I guess you can feel like that without too much embarrassement. These days 12 year olds know better, but back then...
So she wanted to know if I wanted to go with her to the mall. She wanted to go by where this guy worked, flirt a little, and see if he wanted to go to the movies when he got off work in an hour. Since it was something I wanted to see as well, she asked if I wanted to go, sort of as moral support. I agreed, cause what the hell else was going on? Nothing, so off we went.
We talked about boys, we talked about drinking, we talked about the kinds of things girls are wont to talk about.
We got to the mall, and Debbie introduced me to Michael.
*pause*
He was adorable. Blonde haired, blue eyed, tall, even for me, and nicely built. great sense of humor, loved to talk, the works.
And he absolutely could not abide having Debbie around.
She was flirting her ass off, hair flipping, giggling, the works, and he was having none of it. Instead, he was talking to me about my college courses, comparing it to their high school, with the occasional flippant comment thrown to Debbie now and then.
And I was head over heels in love. I hid it well. I wandered off to look around the store so they could talk, but it always ended up with them following right behind me, mostly because he was following right behind me. It was heart breaking, looking back at it now, because Debbie really thought he was it. And she never stood a chance with him, with or without me in the picture. It was that obvious he didn't care about her that way. He tolerated her the way guys like that tolerate a younger sister.
So eventually she got around to asking him if he wanted to go to the movies, and the first thing out of his mouth was "Is Luanne going?"
He's looking at me, Debbie is standing behind him nodding furiously in my direction, and so I said yes.
So we went. Mike insisted on sitting between us, claiming he could look like a stud with two beautiful women, one on each side. Debbie ate it up like you would expect. I don't even remember what we went to see, but I do remember how warm his hand was when he slid it under my jacket to hold my hand.
He gave Debbie a ride home, I went back to Grandmama's house, and I watched tv, and ate dinner, and talked like I was actually there, but I wasn't.
Later that night, "past a decent hour" as my grandmama said, the phone rang. It wasn't that late, not for a worldy college girl (it was only 9 pm) but my grandma was old fashioned, so she *harumphed* a couple of times as she handed me the phone.
It was Mike, and he was upset. He wanted to talk to me, and suggested we meet at the Cherry Street park, a place I had grown up walking to and playing in all my life whenever I visited my grandparents.
Grandmother was not impressed...lol.
Decent women didn't do things like that, but she trusted me (which was more than my own mother would have done) because she knew how I had been raised, and that I wouldn't do anything to get into trouble.
So off I went, and as I got out it started to rain. There was an old field stone building, arched doorways at either end, and I ran for it, just as Mike ran in from the other side. We giggled at each other, and I asked him what was going on. We stood in the center of this arch, watching the rain pouring down in sheets, and he told me how he felt about Debbie. She was a good kid (talk about damning with faint praise, at that age) but it just wasn't what he wanted at that point in his life. Girls his age bored him, because it was all about clothes and makeup and partying, etc.
Everybody who EVER heard this conversation please raise your hand....
So I asked him what he did want.
He wanted me.
No one had ever wanted me. I wasn't what you would call the multi-dating type. For reference please see the above rant about the guys in my class now hunting me up on Facebook...
I was awkward, tall for my age, not real cool.
He wanted me anyway. And for all the reasons that most guys didn't.
Then he stepped in, put his hand on my cheek, and kissed me.
That kiss will probably go down in history as the most romantic movie type kiss in my life. He put his arms around me, and when my knees started to give out, he lowered me to the old stone floor, and kissed me again. The rain was pouring outside, there was thunder and lightning, and I was head over heels in love for the very first time in my young life.
After we talked for another hour, I told him I had to get home before Grandma locked me out. He asked if he could see me again before I left, and I told him he had to take care of things with Debbie first, but I gave him my address and phone number back home, and told him to write me when he decided what he wanted to do. He agreed, and we both went our separate ways.
Apparently he talked to Debbie, because while I didn't talk to her but once before I left, I did have the dubious pleasure of her dad, my uncle, coming over for lunch the day before I left. She had talked to him, and here he came up the front stairs for lunch. He came in, sat at the table, and just went berserk. He was swinging that bible at me like it was a fly swatter, calling me every nasty heathenish name he could think of, prefacing every sentence with "My girlfriend on the 700 Club told me that you were a______"
See, my uncle was convinced that one of the choir singers on the show was his girlfriend because while she was singing, she was looking right at him through the tv, and he just knew God wanted them to be together.....
He swore at me like any good Christian, threatened me, swung that bible at me, and while it is not one of my happiest memories of him, what came next was.
My grandma, all 5 foot nothing of her, stepped out of the kitchen, pointed the cooking fork she had in her hand to turn her homemade fried chicken with, and she said "Now you listen to me. You will not talk to my granddaughter that way, I don't care of you ARE my son. She is a good girl, she has done nothing wrong, and Debbie is just going to have to learn that if she is going to have doins with menfolk, that she is occasionally going to get her heart broke. Now either clean up your filthy mouth, or get your feet out from under my table and hit the road."
I have never been so proud of that woman in my life, and I took her out to dinner that night to say thank you. I also bought her flowers, and had one of my needlework pieces framed so she could have it.
Debbie called, and said she was going to make things work with Mike. I felt like ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag, but I wished her well, and I headed back to Macon.
A day after I got back, I got my first letter from Mike. It was full of how much he loved me, how happy he was when he was with me, how much he missed me. He was going to work at the World's Fair that summer, and he was going to save all his money so he could come see me. He had talked to Debbie, she hadn't taken it well (no surprise there) but he felt ok about everything. I wrote him back, saying the same things, telling him about school, about working as a cocktail waitress, and how much I missed him.
Two days later the phone rang. My mom called to me in my room and said it was Debbie, and she wanted to say hi.
Suffice it to say that what followed in the next 30 minutes on the phone bore little resemblence to someone who wanted to say hi. When mom heard my end of the conversation, she picked up the phone in her room and listened in.
What she heard curled her hair, and mine too. According to Debbie, I had ruined her life, she was never going to talk to me again, she swore like a sailor, using words even I had never heard, and that certainly my mother would have never heard in polite conversation, or any OTHER kind of conversation, much less USED, and she was insisting that I had turned her into a......
Lesbian.
That's right folks. I have the power to take women and turn them against men and into lesbians by sheer force of will. Amazing how that kind of power makes you feel, ain't it...
My mother had a conniption. Not the funny, Bill Cosby "her head split down the middle and a flame wrapped skull appeared" conniption.
My mother had a knock down, drag out FIT.
She called me everything in the book short of a dirty little white girl, and would have gone there if my Dad hadn't intervened. My dad seemed to understand a little bit better what was going on, mostly because I had told him what had happened, and he could see from the look on my face just how badly this was upsetting me. So he got my mom away from me, finished the conversation with Debbie (I could still hear her screaming into the phone, and her mom in the background), and then got me to my room. He held me till I stopped crying, and then he asked me point blank if I loved this guy. I told him yes. And he said "Fine. Then we will work everything out."
And I trusted him. He was my dad, and he had always helped me when the chips were really down, and he would do it now. He went off to talk (calm down) my mom, and then the next day we had a nice long conversation, all three of us, and we decided we would let things happen the way they were intended to happen, and they would try to talk to Debbie.
THAT conversation was never repeated to me. Suffice it to say, Debbie and I were not on speaking terms ever again.
Mike and I wrote back and forth all summer. It was glorious to have someone who felt that way about me at that time, and I was reveling in it. He sent me postcards from the fair, with flowers drawn on them. I know it doesn't sound like much now, but back then......
Shortly after classes started, I came home around noon, to have lunch and get ready for work. When I walked into the house, Mama was downstairs in the kitchen. When I walked in, she stopped what she was doing and told me Grandmama had called. I asked her if everything was ok with her, she said yes, and then she asked me if the name of the guy that Debby and I had fought over was Michael Adams. I said yes, why, was Debbie causing trouble again?
For one of the few times in my life, my mom walked over, sat down next to me and put her arms around me. She said no, that grandmama had called because she had bad news.
Michael. My beautiful boy. Mike had been coming home from work one night, and a drunk driver had crossed the center line and hit him head on. Mike was killed instantly. I was never going to hear his voice, feel his arms around me, or feel that way with him again. He was just gone.
And the kid that hit him was just that. Some kid who had conned an adult into buying him beer, and was driving hammered.
I have been a bartender for 30 years. I have carded people who were forty just so I could keep from selling to minors ever again. I quit drinking for a year, making sure that all my college buddies had a safe ride when we all went out.
A week after he died, I got a letter from Michael. Full of love and excitement about the fact that he had the money to come see me. How he was looking forward to being with me and showing me how much he loved me.
That was 30 years ago.
On Tuesday, I logged into Yahoo to check my email. THIS is what I found:
*******************
Hi Luanne,
Debbie McCluney wants to be friends with you on Facebook.
Debbie McCluney
Debbie says, "Well..hi dont i know you? british columbia...really?? Steve not have a page?".
Thanks,
The Facebook Team
*****************************
Steve is my asshole brother- haven't talked to him since he showed up to Daddy's funeral drunk, for obvious reasons.
I have yet to figure out what I am going to do. Steve's son and daughter are on facebook, and certainly have better access to their dad than I do, more or less. He doesn't treat them any better than anyone else, so they pretty much don't have much to do with him either.
I hate Facebook.
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