If there’s one thing working at my previous place of employment taught me, it’s that inside, very few people get wise. I think we tend to get mellower about certain things, but mostly not relationships with people. We do get better at the social norms and communication and basically not creating massive drama. But I’m not sure our feelings ever really catch up. Because 60 year olds in chat rooms? Can have just as much drama as your average grade 8 class.
Witness: Facebook. A metric ton of drama because the thin veneer of socialization cracks. Which may or may not be part of why I don’t really love Facebook very much. Actually I don’t love Facebook because normally I keep my friends and bio-family and work all reasonably separate (although there are some work and friends crossovers) and Facebook combines them all and I am never sure what to say. When people hit my blog, I presume they have made a choice to listen to me.
Facebook, on the other hand, is in the realm of email or even the phone or a mailbox (you know, the ancient physical kind) where you sort of have to look in there to stay in touch, but others may have dropped envelopes full of coupons, or something.
And it’s not so much that I don’t like the coupons – really I’m pretty good about sorting my mail or ignoring things on Facebook that don’t pertain to me (Farmville and other games, I’m looking at you here). Although maybe too good – I never know if there’s an expectation that I will keep up on everything there. Because – I won’t. To do that I’d have to limit it to about 20 people, or something. It’s not that I’m all-important or busier than most people. It’s really that if I tried, I would never work or clean my house again because I would be constantly worrying about what I’d missed. I have to let it go wholely or not at all.
So – I find Facebook hard to use to talk about me. I don’t want to be saying too much really. It’s one of my personality quirks. So I end up undersharing, if anything. I think. Then I make an effort to share more and wonder if now I’ve spammed everyone…you see the difficulty. I do start to feel like those tense days in early adolescence where it felt like everyone was waiting to pounce on my every sin. (See also: Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. BTW the high school the older brother went to in that book is where I went once it was made co-ed. Ahem.)
Usually in person, I don’t get into these loops. But I just had one of those really weird experiences where I’ve been more-or-less busting my butt (in a reflexive way) to make time to hang out with someone, happily enough I might add. But said someone didn’t really want to hang out that much either. Well…either is strong. For me, it was fine, but not without effort. However, since they really didn’t want to, that puts me in the one-down position of having wanted to.
And I do find it disproportionately upsetting. I mean, if the thing is that neither of us has time to hang out X times a month and instead we should go to X/4 or whatever, there is no conflict. Or so logic says. But inside, I feel stupid. It’s sort of like even though I know my motives were relatively pure, I’m waiting for the whole “oh my GOD how could you NOT KNOW” thing or whatever.
Anyways, it’s interesting. It’s good to be writing about this stuff again.
