Facebook is scary

Hola Amigos,

Facebook is sort of fun, sometimes, but mostly I find it frightening. This has nothing to do with any of my buddies on Facebook (you know who you are), they're the fun part of it.

What I'm afraid of is I am not sure how much I want to be tapped into this whole 'let's publish our lives' sort of thing. Of course, I do have this blog. But I control that pretty well, keep things ambiguous enough to feel relatively safe, and a person would have to know me or dig pretty hard to find this little gem.

But now that I'm on Facebook...

Oh, I'll cut to the chase here. I got 'friended' by someone I went to grade school and high school with. A perfectly nice woman, that's not a problem. She recently asked me for my address and email because she's putting together a 'reunion' of our grade school graduating class. We graduated in 1979, so this year would make it 30 years.

Maybe you all had better experiences with grade school, and I have no doubt that her experience was better than mine. But to me, grade school was hell. I was so, so incredibly unhappy.

I can give examples, of course. I think I will, actually. But let me preface them by saying that I'm not a bitter person. I do not hold grudges. I don't remain angry (on the rare occasions that I get angry at all). I don't tend to ever 'hate' people (except in a global, general way: I hate Dick Cheney; I hate Sarah Palin; that sort of thing). But when you're 11, 12, 13...you're old enough to remember things that hurt you. I don't mean I still feel any pain about it now. Being an adult has given me perspective and I can think about things that happened without feeling one thing over another. But try as I might, I never really forget. The forgiving part I have down pat. The forgetting, not so much.

I wasn't ostracized per se. I had friends. But I went to a pretty crappy school, I got a pretty crappy education, and my classmates were often pretty crappy themselves.

The school would never admit to being crappy. But they were crappy with a capital crappy. This was a Catholic grade school that I HAD to attend because that was the church where people in my neighborhood had to go. You COULD attend a different one, but you weren't supposed to. This was the grade school for my address. And God knows my parents weren't going to mess around with that (as a side note, what did my parents do the minute I was out of grade school? Started going to another church; they didn't like it there any more than I did; thanks a mil, mom and pop).

Things started out OK. I transferred at the end of third grade. You know, 4th, 5th, even 6th grade, everyone seemed to be on equal footing. Things started getting ugly in 7th grade, and from that point forward it was just an endurance test for me.

Oh, there's so much back story here. It wasn't just my fellow students who got to me, it was the damn teachers. I don't know if you've ever been in a class where the teacher obviously doesn't like you. It's not fun, folks. My homeroom teacher for all of 7th grade never got my name right. Not once. And it wasn't like a class of 80 or something. I was one of maybe 20 kids. I don't mean she pronounced it wrong. I mean she called me by an entirely different name from the first day of school to the last.

I had teachers who actively ridiculed kids for getting things wrong (including me). I had teachers who by today's standards would lose their jobs for the 'affection' they used to show some of the girls, to the complete exclusion of other students. Do you have any idea how much that can mess with your head? Of course you must remember this was a Catholic school in the 70s. So much shit could go down and they'd do absolutely nothing about it. Not a fun environment.

And the kids, well. What can I say? It was just a long stream of gossip I wasn't in on, parties I wasn't invited to, disappointment after disappointment. Of course now it's all so ridiculous and I couldn't care less. But honestly amigos, some of these people were JUST NOT NICE. For all that Catholic teaching and living like Jesus and 'do unto others' baloney they crammed down our throats...well, let's just say that a lot of folks talked the talk, but not many walked the walk, teacher, student, priest alike.

I remember going horseback riding with some girls. I arranged the whole thing. And my dad, the sweetheart that he was, agreed to drive us to the stable. And while we were riding (usually for an hour or 90 minutes) he'd just sit in the car and read. We did this two or three times; same girls, same stable, same dad. And I remember vividly having them come up to me some time later and tell me all about how they went riding and how much fun it was, and how I would have had fun had I been with them. So...they just didn't invite me. And then felt the need to come and tell me all about it. A 13 year old person has to know that's not right. I was 13. I knew it wasn't right.

Oh, and then there was the 'reunion' that they had the summer after 8th grade. I found out about it after the fact. Everyone was invited except me and a few friends. WTF is that all about?

And like I said, these things don't make me mad. They didn't scar me for life and I don't really care about any of it anymore. But tell me, why on EARTH would I ever care to see any of these people ever again? Why? What possible reason could I have? They weren't nice people then. All but 3 girls from my class went to my high school. High school (which I loved) didn't make them any nicer. And sure, it's 30 years. Of course they've changed. I've changed, we've all changed. But at reunions, isn't there a lot of reminiscing, trips down memory lane, etc.? I'm so completely not interested in any of that. And I happen to be blessed with some of the most wonderful friends a person could ever hope for; I'd much rather spend time with them than try and rekindle anything with these folks.

I'm in the book. If they decide they want to talk with me now, or see what I'm up to, they can call me. But I'm certainly not going to walk right into it. I've got so many other, better things to do.

In conclusion, Facebook is scary.