Facebooking

Facebook is a weird place. Recently I saw that one of my FB friends was tagged in a video and so I clicked on it. OH MY GOODNESS it was so clearly post-coital that I had to avert my eyes. If I wanted to see half-dressed people making gooey faces at each other, I would-- I would--

...I can't finish that sentence because I just don't want to see half-dressed people making gooey faces at each other. Just. Don't. It was all the more squirm-inducing because this was a guy I'd had a terrible crush on all through high school and then dated off and on during college. NO GOOEY FACES, PLEASE.

Sometimes I'll see the weirdest pairings-- my vaguely hippie friend who's always posting left-leaning political stuff is attending the Leonid meteor shower with my friend who left behind his birth name to become Fr. John Paul, a Dominican priest. Let's hope they don't try to talk about the Stupak amendment around the figurative punchbowl, or there could be fireworks of the non-celestial variety.

Also? I just got a friend request from John Michael Talbot. This is puzzling.

I haven't been back to the town where I went to high school since 1994 -- my parents moved away in 1995 and the people I stayed in touch with all seemed to live somewhere else. But there's a big knot of high school people who are all FB friends and so I have been seeing these faces and names that haven't been on my radar for years. It is, I reiterate, a weird place, where this strange gallimaufry of the thoughtful and the frivolous assails you when you log in: "I ate too much for dinner and I'm stuffed," says one woman I haven't seen since 1987. "My mom's been dead for 20 years tomorrow," says another. And that's from one page of status updates tonight. It could give a person whiplash.