Congratulations! You're all grown up! (But you're still an immature nitwit.)

Possible alternate titles for this post:

"Why My High School Reunion Would Be A Complete Waste Of Time"

--OR--

"Cliques Are Forever"

I joined Facebook at the beginning of 2008, a few months before I became pregnant with Kaleb.  For several years before, I have been a member on MySpace.  However, as MySpace began to be taken over more and more by spammers and middle schoolers, I made the move to Facebook.....where the other "grown ups" seemed to be going.  I thought it would be a perfect way to keep in touch with friends, and reconnect with people from my past.  As it turns out, I was both right and wrong.

After joining Facebook, I rapidly received friend requests from lots and lots of my former classmates and  friends from different stages of my life.  For the most part, I accepted the requests from anyone I knew, putting aside whatever differences we may have had in the past and assuming that they must have moved past it as well since they had sent me requests.  My list of connections grew and grew and I discovered it was fun reconnecting with these people I hadn't seen in 8 years or more.
The great thing about Facebook is that it allows you to quickly open up lines of conversation on virtually any topic and get feedback just as quickly.  You can discover which of your friends share your interests and keep up with social events.  Detractors say that Facebook is the reason that people don't communicate "in person" anymore, but as life moves at a faster and faster pace, I believe that Facebook has become one of the few tools that allows us to fit personal communications into our overfilled schedules.  In fact, thanks to Facebook, I'm better friends with some people now because of our online communications than I was when I saw them every day back in high school but never had time to get to know them.

Over time, I noticed that some of the people I was connecting with online really seemed to like hearing from me, while others seemed to find communication more a nuisance than anything else.  Some of these "friends" who had asked me to connect with them online would ignore my comments or delete them entirely....leaving intact the comments of other people who had expressed thoughts nearly the same as my own.  Oddly enough, these were the same people (95% were female) who had ignored, teased, and excluded me from their cliques way back when we were all in high school together.

At first, I couldn't believe that 10ish years of life experience still hadn't matured these girls beyond that exclusive, cliquish mentality.  They were still the same better-than-you cookie cutter "popular" people that they were in school!  I had always believed that that state of mind was something you outgrew as an adult.  After all this time, I had learned not to hate them for the awful way they treated me in school.....so why couldn't they outgrow treating people badly?  I almost feel sorry for them, because treating others harshly is apparently how they make themselves feel better or more powerful.  It is certainly worthy of pity.

But, pity or not, I saw no reason to maintain connections with these people.  So, the night before last, I executed a mass deletion of all the "dead weight" on my connection list.  In a span of about 15 minutes, I reduced the list from 337 people to the current 186.  Gone are the cliquish women, the "friend collectors," and the people who have generally idle accounts.  What remains is a list of people who are interesting and, more importantly, mature.

The breakdown of my remaining contacts is as follows:
18 people I met at churches I attended as a child.
12 of my Dad's current or former Drama students.
16 people I met in elementary school.
10 people I met in middle school.
59 people I met in high school.
12 people I met at former jobs.
3 people I met while I was married.
34 people I've met in my post-marriage adult life.
9 members of my family.
12 people I met online.
Lastly, Kaleb's father.

After this cleaning-out of my contact list, I started to think about the fact that all these people I've deleted are the same types of people who tend to populate events like high school reunions.  They gather to compare their wealth and beauty and success, to brag about their perfect children and homes, and to share the details of their fabulous vacations and cushy lifestyles.  They'll stand together on one side of a rented party hall someplace, in groups made up of the same members as the cliquish little groups they traveled in ten years before.  They'll turn up their noses at those people on the other side of the room, the ones who didn't have the benefits of being born perfectly beautiful, or being raised by doctors and lawyers and wealthy socialites, or being gifted with superb athletic abilities.  Yuppies raised by Southern well-to-dos -- I can't say that I really have any desire to spend a weekend at a beach or some bar socializing with a group of people who, in our teens, treated me either like I was less than dirt or like I was altogether invisible.

I think I'll just be content with the contact I do have with my former schoolmates, some here online and a few in person.  It fits quite nicely into my life.  Most of my time these days is spent with my family and closest friends, anyway.  Besides, in the nonphysical world of the internet, it's just so much easier to delete people from your life!