What the hell is dysentery*?

Confused about its identity as a college and post-college site, Facebook has begun allowing high school kids to sign up. This is a bad move. Now it is lame, like MySpace.

For me, this means one thing: pretty soon, I will have more high school friends than college and post-college ones. I was a camp counselor for so many years (see previous post), and these kids are really good at finding me. They even IM me to encourage me to return to camp, which they think I will. But I won't.

Either way, I feel like I have the responsibility with all the new people on Facebook to lay out some ground rules as to what is okay and what is not in terms of the pictures you put in your Facebook profile. (Don't even think about not having a Facebook picture. That's worst of all.)

The following things are not cool:

1. Putting up a picture of yourself holding an alcoholic beverage
This is a dumb idea for many reasons. First, if you are under 21, you are just asking to get caught. Now I think it's obnoxious lame when school administrators browse Facebook to try to catch underage kids with drinks in their hands in order to reprimand them. But holding a bottle of who-knows-what clear liquid with lots of friends around is equally annoying. It's your profile. Not your drunk friends'.

2. Putting up a picture of yourself holding/being held by a significant other.
Way to learn some independence. You were you long before you met him/her and by putting him/her in your profile you're saying that you lost some of you by meeting him/her. That may have been too many pronouns in one sentence, but you get the idea.

3. Putting up a picture of something that is not yourself.
This is also lame. It's called Facebook not Fingerpaintingbyathreeyearoldbook or Celebritywhoisbetterlookingthanmebook. Just in case you were confused.

(At this point I've realized this blog isn't as funny as it was the first time I wrote it, the "first time I wrote it" being two weeks ago, but my computer crashed before I hit the "publish post" button. So do I abort or continue to an unsatisfactory ending? You be the judge...)

4. Joining a Facebook group
These groups try to bring together people from disperate backgrounds under a common heading but aren't really very interesting or useful or anything. The only acceptable group to join is the Oregon Trail group because it's hilarious. If I had a dollar for every time I said, "What do you mean I can only carry 99 pounds of meat back to the wagon," I would have at least eight or nine dollars, which back when I was playing the game regularly (say, 1993) would have almost been a lot of money, especially if I had invested it in Microsoft, in which case I'd be a hundred-aire.

Facebook is useful, however, to find out how that girl you dated five years ago looks. So it's not totally bad. Happy stalking!

*Dysentery is a disorder of the intestinal tract that gives you severe diarrhea and apparently happened a lot in the Western U.S. about 150 years ago, or whenever/wherever Oregon Trail was set.


To update from a previous post... Just in case you were wondering, it was Meredith who Ben asked to marry him. Sorry for the omission. Meredith and I are good friends, went to the same school (at different times) and illegally ran onto the Clemson football field (or tip-toed, more likely, but "running on" makes for a better story). Thanks to her, I take the "L" (not the "El") and "champ at the bit" (not "chomp"). She is obviously really good at grammar. And I value that in friendship. Nice job, Ben, with the engagement.