ON CALLING IT QUITS

As I browsed Facebook this morning, I realized something: I don't care about many of the people on my "friends" list. Not at all. I don't care how well they know each other, I don't care which Disney princess they resemble, and I don't care if they lost their phone.

I sound very cantankerous in that paragraph. Please bear with me.

I also strongly suspect that those people don't care about me. But at this point, it's apparently much easier to keep someone as a "Facebook friend" than to click the three times necessary to de-friend someone (in this instance, of course, "de-friend" being a completely acceptable verb). I gave that some thought and realized that it isn't the effort to remove them from a friends list that is the problem - it's the social cost.

Take this example: I de-friend someone who used to be an RA for me here. They come back to visit and I see them on campus. They haven't seen my status updates advertising improv or podcasts in a while and realize I am no longer their facebook friend. Social awkwardness ensues, until I end up apologizing profusely, because that's what I do.

But my train of thought does not stop just at local destinations! I have the boyfriend of a former RA as a Facebook friend. He now lives in India, and has no plans to return to the US. I have no plans to travel to India. I have not spoken with him in five years, and even then, our conversations were perfunctory at best. So why on earth can't I bring myself to click "Remove Friend?" What, on the off chance that I am traveling in India AND the hotel loses my reservation so I need a place to stay and I have Wifi access AND he just happens to be on Facebook at the same time AND is willing to put me up for the night AND cook me bland American food? That seems like a highly unlikely confluence of events.

It's entirely possible that I hold on to these people for selfish advertising purposes - the more people SEE a status update advertising a new podcast or something, the more likely we are to have someone check it out...probably. It's been a while since I've taken a marketing class. So to remove those potential sets of eyes - well, that's just shooting myself in the foot, right?

I guess it comes down to knowing who my friends are, and being able to differentiate between real friends and Facebook friends, which really isn't that difficult. I would delete this whole post, but I DID use "cantankerous," "perfunctory," and "confluence." Woohoo vocab!