Waiting for Gouda

Well, I finally succumbed to some very, very mild pressure got myself an account on one of those “social networking” sites.  MyHeadSpace, or something.

The idea, as far as I can ascertain, is that it’s a great place to to pretend to stay in touch with people that you intentionally don’t talk to anymore.  You can look at their photos if they have any, and see what they are doing right at that exact moment.  Or at least what they have recently said they were doing right at that exact moment that they typed it.  So, for example, you can see that that one guy Ted that you used to work with a few years ago had chicken for dinner three days ago.

So, it’s really useful.

So when you first sign up, you have to find your friends.  Otherwise, the system taunts you, “You have no friends,” and I don’t need that kind of reminder from a stinking piece of software.  I decided I needed to find my friends immediately, so I did a search for my alma mater.

Within minutes, I was looking at a long list of people who claim to have attended the same schools that I did at more or less the same time that I did.  I say “claim” because, as far as I can tell, BookMyFacepedia does absolutely no fact checking.  Anyone can say that they’ve graduated from any old school they feel like.

There is plenty of opportunity for lying on the ol’ FlickrTube, believe you me, whether it’s education, employment, hobbies… whatever. Just as soon as I’m done here, I fully intend to make myself a Ph.D. astronaut who races ostriches in my spare time.  No, I don’t ride them.  I run against the ostriches.  And I win, every time.  And you can’t question it, because it says so right there in my MyProfile profile.

So I’m perusing the list of faces and names, and one of the first things I notice is that time has been very kind to a great deal of my fellow alumni. Freakishly kind, in fact. Many of them appear to have not just preserved their youthful skin and firm bodies of their younger days, but have actually reversed the aging process.  Several classmates now appear in their photographs to be no more than three or four years old.  Included in this suspicious group is a young lady whose name leads me to believe that perhaps we made out on more than one occasion.  (We used to call it “making out”, anyway.  Now’s it probably called FacePoke or something.  um… LOL?… omg).  If this girl looks like a toddler now, fifteen years later, what could she have looked like then?  It’s a wonder I didn’t get arrested.  And why didn’t my friends say something?  I shall have to ask them, if I can ever find them in this brave new world.

Since I’ve signed onto this thing, I’ve been subjected to all sorts of bizarre taunts and offers.  I’ve been poked (whatever that means), superpoked (super-whatever that means), sent a virtual cup of coffee, invited to describe what kind of beverage I would be, been made a virtual noble in a virtual kingdom, received a couple of eyesores (I don’t know), been bitten by a virtual vampire, and been purchased on some sort of virtual human black market (twice).

Like I said.  Useful.

I don’t know what is the point of this whole SpankHead thing.  But everybody’s using it.  I better go update my status.