Picture Of Dorian Gray

Things happen for a reason.  You make friends and acquaintances.  Life moves on, times change, and the cast of characters in your life constantly refreshes itself.  You lose track of people and you keep some people close to you.  This is good.  This is the way life is supposed to be. This is the natural order of things.

Facebook had turned this ages old ritual on it's ass.  The other day, I was bored.  So I let my mind wander and allowed myself to remember people I have known in my life.  People I lost track of for one reason or another.  I managed to remember quite a few people, and their full names.  So I started looking for them on facebook, and I found about three-quarters of them.

As some of you have found out, this is not necessarily a good thing.  I can think of only one word to describe the feelings I had when I saw pictures of almost all of these people.  Horror.

Sure ... ten to thirty years had gone by, but the inevitable had occurred.  They looked old, gaunt, fat, short, sick, bloated, bald, saggy, gray, wrinkled.  If they had written something on their info page, they were married, divorced, widowed, grand parents, great-grandparents, childless, mentally ill, crippled, tragic, assholes, saints.

I got a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.  And a feeling of ill-being like I hadn't experienced in ages.  If these people looked like this ... and these things had happened to them ... then what it the hell am I going to seem like to them, if they look me up?

Plus, I didn't even like some of these people when they were in my life.  Way to go Rob, dredging up all of those bad feelings that you had jettisoned years ago.

I've always believed that there is a predetermined script for everyone in life.  Fate should determine when and if you lose contact with, and meet certain people again across the years.  Certainly not an overblown, world-wide social networking site.  In my short experience, it causes more problems than it solves.

I've been on facebook for about a year now, and it's time for me to seriously consider if I want to continue with it. Maybe it's time to start simplifying some things again and let life move on like it was meant to in the beginning.

Shit, I need to go take my picture down.