I spend a good part of my time in a state of abject confusion. The list of things I don’t understand is long and getting longer and it includes: Justin Bieber. Log Cabin Republicans. Honey Boo Boo. The popularity of P.F. Chang’s. And, especially, Facebook.
I find Facebook totally mystifying because I was raised in a very private environment where one did not discuss anything personal in public. Or even in private, for that matter. Now there is no event so private or so personal that it cannot be posted to the world at large.
For example, I knew that the daughter of a coworker was having problems getting pregnant; her mother confided it to me after several drinks in a hushed whisper with the admonition, ”Please don’t tell anyone.”
Imagine my surprise when I saw her daughter’s Facebook post at 11:15 on a Saturday morning: “Temperature up! I’m ovulating! Time to make a baby!” At 11:19 she posted again. “We’re done! Keep your fingers crossed!” Several dozen people “liked” this post and not one made an unseemly comment on the speed of the event, or mentioned that perhaps she could have waited to post until her husband finished his cigarette.
My cousin’s son has no problem with fertility. He announced on his Facebook page that he was the proud papa of a brand new baby girl which surprised me, because I did not know his wife was pregnant. As I subsequently discovered, his wife was not pregnant but his girlfriend was, but he requested that no one mention the new baby to his wife. Unfortunately, his wife read his Facebook page and as you can imagine, this did not end well.
He also posted a picture of the new baby taken mere seconds after delivery, before the cord was even cut. Am I the only one who would prefer to see a picture of the baby when she was clean and rosy and sleeping peacefully, and when the new mother had at least had time to comb her hair? I have an image of my cousin’s son, smart phone in hand, lurking near the foot of the bed and offering words of encouragement: “Push harder. I want to post before the end of the Dolphins game.”
Several days ago, I was reading a post from a D-list friend who I was close to in the 1980’s. We lost contact when she moved to California specifically to escape her mother, whom she referred to, on a good day, as “that meddling gargoyle,” and expressing the desire to put a continent between them. As recently as last year she told me on her Christmas card that her mom was in a nursing home in Boca, asking rhetorically “Will this woman never die?”
Now I read that her mother had “passed into eternity” at 3:45 that afternoon, with my friend and my friends’s sister at her side. Her lengthy post was a beautiful tribute to a doting mother from a grieving daughter but it was pure fiction. As I reread the post I noticed that my friend had posted the tribute at 3:48, a mere 3 minutes after her mother had gone “to a better place.” This meant that the post had been written well in advance and I had a vision of my friend, smartphone in hand, waiting with bated breath for her mother to expire so she could post the news: “Now?” I imagined her asking her sister. “Not yet,” said the sister, “she’s still breathing.”
My dilemma now was how to properly respond to a death announcement posted on Facebook; a sympathy card seemed so old-school. I pondered for a bit and then did what 47 other people had already done. Not knowing or caring how it would be interpreted, I pressed “like.”