Facebook "friends"

I have something like 80 facebook friends. This phenomenon is maddening. I don't have 80 friends. I don't have 80 people that I could invite over for dinner. I don't even like 80 people in this world. And 80 isn't even a lot. eBoy has over 100. My niece has something like 300. People collect facebook friends the way I collect dustbunnies and books I'll probably never read - just for bragging rights.

My favorite facebook friends have got to be the couple of gals that I went to middle and highschool with, who - for six years - never engaged in an actual conversation with me, would never have given me the time of day, would never have spoken to me if I ran into them at a party, and who basically treated me as something stuck to the bottom of a leper's shoe from 7th grade on. I'm not bitter (any more),I'm just saying these girls were NOT my friends, had no desire to be my friends, but here they are, 20 years later (ulp), popping up on FB, friending me.

I don't think i need to really point out that these tended to be the "popular" gals in my class, but I will anyway. So maybe asking me to be their friend now is their version of noblesse oblige, or maybe it's just their way of upping their friend numbers. Or maybe they *would* have been friends with me in HS if I hadn't been so socially awkward, painfully shy, and a bit standoff-ish. Who can say. But they progressed from being downright mean in 7th grade to just ignoring me by 12th - which in a class of just 40 people is a bit of an accomplishment. Anyway, just think how close we'll all be by the time we're in wheelchairs and walkers. (And actually, there are plenty of these women from my class that continue to ignore me and that's fine - at least they seem reality based.)

Anyway, I was ruminating over this whole thing last night because one of them posted a picture of the whole lot of them from those days on her FB page (actually, the woman that posted the picture was very nice in highschool, but it's not like she and I ever had a single solitary conversation with one another - which is my point).

Anyway, naturally, I'm not in the photo. My presence at our school made about as much sense as a dog in a wig factory, so no one was pushing me into photos or hanging out with me in the Senior Room. But even at this late point in life, just seeing that photo brought back so many of those old insecurities. How is that still even possible?

Okay, more on this later I suspect.