In Parentheses

By: Alicia Delvaux

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April 10, 2008

Well, after a social networking hiatus, I’m back on Facebook for who knows long again. I had given it up (along with Myspace) early this fall after I started to feel that I just didn’t truly, personally know all 500 of my “friends.” And so I’m back (from outer space, you might say,) at least on Facebook, because one day I was bored. Really that’s it. Living on your own in a new city over a year has its perks, but it also has its drawbacks. Having a hard time meeting new people and missing your old friends is surely one of them.

So I logged in again and reactivated (Facebook makes it incredibly hard to partially erase your web fingerprint) and that was that. I was updating my status (lonely, working out, happy, eating Rolo candy until my face explodes, etc.,) checking on my friends’ lives, and basically not doing that much more actual social interacting, but feeling relatively satisfied in knowing I’m not an island in life’s ocean.

I’ve been messaging back and forth with a friend all night, an old friend from way back in the day. I knew her sister. Her sister was dear to me. Years ago, we talked. We spent time. We took pictures. She is still taking pictures, this girl I messaged with nonchalantly, catching up on locations and relations and things in between and beyond, like family and jobs. I perused some of the pictures on her page as I avoided cleaning my apartment.

They are normal shots. People posing on porches, in yards, in houses, in jeans, in shorts, in bare feet, with babies, with pets, with comrades, with relatives, with smiles and smirks and serious faces and sexy grins.

(I’m not entirely sure, looking back on that sentence, that grins are found sexy by everyone, but it is my honest hope that they are found sexy by at least several, because real joy, real happiness, is attractive.)

Anyways. Social networking has always been a double-edged sword for me. I like the connectedness it provides. I like knowing what my contacts are doing. I like having people care (or at least seem to care) about what I’m doing. I know, however, deep down inside me, that the “seem to” encased in the parentheses there is all too accurate when it comes to the power that is the internet. Or at least, I thought it was.

I guess that before, I put way too much emphasis on the meaning of all my social networking. I thought it was stupid because it wasn’t as consequential as real communication. It just couldn’t compare to the dealings of every day life. But, when I gave it up, I realized I wasn’t giving up “false” relationships, because Facebook (Myspace, etc.) is only a tool. My mistake was in regarding it as more.

Not surprising to me, when I clicked around Facebook and landed on my old friend’s ordinary photographs, something in me perked up a little. Pictures of regular people doing regular things made me think of one of my own little mantras: “Your life is beautiful.” It is. It is my main conclusion from looking around on an internet domain that is a lot about being your self and keeping in touch. Maybe a more cynical person might have thought something different, but I guess you could say my soul grinned a little bit.

(Yeah, I’m telling you my soul is sexy. Perhaps yours is, too.)