Facebook Friends

I admit, when I first joined Facebook, I went out looking for old friends hoping to reconnect. Friends from high school (I was 5 years removed at the time), that I had seen maybe once over a random summer since. I did find a few of them. We exchanged greetings and I followed their updates on Facebook for awhile. A year or so into being on Facebook, I decided to do some cleaning. I removed all of those long forgotten friends to be forgotten again (I still remember them but who knows what they are doing).

When I first joined Facebook most of my class wasn't on there. I was in graduate school and Facebook was still limited to students at select colleges. Most of my high school classmates had graduated from college already. Facebook has since changed their membership requirements. It is now just another myspace on the world wide web (a much cleaner looking myspace). Now the numbers of high school classmates on Facebook is increase. It is nice to see some familar faces and names in my suggested friends tags but most of these people I have not talked to since high school. Most of them I barely talked to in high school at all. Yet, some of these people find it necessary to add me as friends. Not wanting to seem rude I accept their friendship and add them to my high school friends roll. Yet I wonder why I have been added as a friend.

The latest request came today. The woman in question when to my high school all fours years. I even had a mild crush on her through out school. However, we did not hang out together. We did not travel in the same clique, and had a class together (either freshman or sophomore year). I recall having maybe a singular full conversation with her freshman year (at freshman orientation even). Now, I did recently change my profile from being open to anyone to just my friends (I am getting old after all). So maybe she just was curious about what I have been up to and what I look like (I am a quite a bit different from high school). I just find it curious that nearly ten years later, she had decided that we need to be Facebook friends.

The other curious add I have is from a guy I went to grade school and high school with. We were pretty decent friends in grade school but he moved away just as we started junior high. In high school we did not really hang out or talk much. I did have quite a few classes with him and were on some teams together. The reason I find this curious is because of something that happened a few years after we graduated. After the final Lord of the Ring installation (the only one I saw in the theaters), I saw this classmate and another coming down the hallway outside the theater. I was not going to stop them and try to catch up, or even say 'hi'. I was just going to give them a nod and a wave to acknowledge their presence. As soon as they saw me though they ducked their heads and the one closest to me even put up his hand to hide is face. It was not a big deal at the time. OK so you have not changed much since high school, that is fine. I will still live without your acknowledgment. So now, five years later, you want to be my Facebook friend. I find it all quite odd.

Now, I know not many people read this blog, and for those of you who stumble upon this, I am sorry for this torture. I am just wondering why people feel the need have all these Facebook friends. I have not received, and I doubt I will, get any wall posts or messages from these classmates asking how I am doing or when I will be back in the area next. I do not expect to get invitations to there up coming wedding or the next unofficial class reunion, which makes it all the more curious to me. Am I really that much of an enigma that you need to add me as a Facebook friend?

Yes I do realize that me accepting their friend request is a bit hypocritical, but I do not want to seem rude.