LYLAS! Via NASA Videographer @ Flickr.This post on how Facebook can work as a kind of trippy time machine by putting you back in touch (of a sort) with people from your formative years is the inspiration for today's FFT.

I’ve certainly had the “whoa, weirdness” feeling when catching up (even by lurking) with the people who knew you when, but Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s flashbacks have apparently been rather traumatizing.  I can’t say the junior high (or middle school, or however you identify that epoch from 12 to 14) was the highlight of my life, but I never had anyone dump yogurt on my head or spread vicious rumors about me.

That said, we all know that young people can be cruel, nasty little pieces of work to each other.  In today’s thread, I’d love to see either a vivid portrait of your junior high self (and how you have or haven’t changed, other than the obvious stuff), a tale of adolescent horror, or your experiences dealing with friends and/or “friends” that you lost track of and only reconnected with due to social media.  Have you used FB (or school reunions or whathaveyou) to borrow Brodesser-Akner’s phrase: ” put [your] life’s ugliest social chapter to rest”?

I wish I had a good story for this one, but I was a “gifted” but not heinously self-conscious spelling-bee nerd.  I had big bangs, but no Guess? jeans.  I lived in an OK neighborhood, but I wasn’t super-pretty.  I passed notes, but I never got those “secret admirer” candy canes at Christmas.  I didn’t qualify for the “popular group” (really, that’s what we called them), but I had plenty of friends and typically awkward interactions with boys I was sweet on.  For me, junior high was one part “normal” life, one part benign neglect.

This is late getting up today, so I’ll chime in regarding The Facebook Effect in comments.

Were you Queen of the Cafeteria?  A neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie?  Could John Hughes have filmed your life?  Bring it!  Or I will SO sleep over at Lisa’s on Friday.

Via mathiole @ Flickr.

My latest post from the Bed, Bitch and Beyond blog at Bitch Magazine, in which we explore what Time dubs “the retrosexual”: when reconnecting via Facebook gives you a second chance to hook up with that hot girl or guy you missed out on in high school, an experience poetically described as springing “from an intense, almost uncontrollable mixture of nostalgia and interest.”

Also featuring a blatant and revealing overshare about my own retrosexual experience with my high school crush.

Does anyone else snicker whenever they get a message saying someone has "poked you?"

My latest from Bed, Bitch and Beyond blog at Bitch Magazine, in which I tackle burning questions about Facebook and the sticky issues of on-line breakups, defriending and why you should never put your relationship status in your profile.

ALL UR FLINGS IZ BELONG TO Me. Via Bryan Veloso @ Flickr.

Are you using a social networking site? Is your significant other? Call your divorce lawyer now! According to an alarmist recent article from an Oklahoma news station:

Nearly half of all Americans use social networking site, but some counselors suggest that going online could be hazardous to marriages.
“We see about 40 percent of the couples coming in, there is a link to Facebook or to MySpace that has caused a breach in their marriage,” said licensed marriage and family therapist Tara Fritsch.

Apparently all those social networking sites facilitate your being in touch–or getting back in touch–with too many people–and therefore might lead to cheating hearts.  Or wandering eyes. Or roaming vaginas.

The Edmond therapist said most connections start off innocently enough.
“An ex-love, an old flame — there’s a nostalgia there. There’s memory of the simple days or maybe excitement of new romance,” she said.

She’s not the only one who believes this. One of my girlfriends once kind of blew my mind last year by fuming over the fact that her (middle-aged, completely decent and faithful) boyfriend had a Facebook page.  Many of his Facebook friends were women he went to college with, and she actually told me that looking at his friends list upset her because “if he’s in touch with them he’ll maybe see that they’re still attractive and maybe eventually he’ll decide he’d rather be with them.” Uh, maybe. Or maybe he’ll realize that he’s dating the kind of jealous control freak who feel threatened by his Facebook page. But maybe this therapist from Oklahoma would agree with her. Is having your significant other out there on the internet dangerous to your relationship?    

Chris Rock once famously said of cheating: “A man is only as faithful as his options.”  Which is simplistic and sexist and smacks of dudely privilege, but there’s a grain of truth there that applies to both sexes. Having choices does make it easier to choose a different situation, or partner.  But cheating doesn’t occur–or very rarely occurs–completely spontaneously. 

If your relationship is on the rocks, or emotionally estranged or just plain unfulfilling, you’re much more likely to cheat. No surprise there. But if you’re discontented and you have a wide circle of friends and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends…you’re a lot more likely to find someone to stray with.
The therapist in this article suggests keeping a tight watch on your spouse’s on-line networking:

Her recommendation is that couples set guidelines for using social networking sites.

“If it’s not something you want your spouse to know about, don’t do it. Have open communication with your spouse. Share your Facebook or MySpace sites. Have one another’s passwords. Talk regularly about who you are chatting with,” Fritsch said.

I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit. It’s appropriate to monitor your child’s on-line use. Not your partner’s. Adults in a relationship have a reasonable expectation of privacy.     

In the past I’ve been friended with my boyfriends on Facebook, but I would never dream of asking for the password to their accounts, any more than I would expect to have access to their e-mail or text messages. And if they’d asked for access to my Facebook account, there would have been trouble. Sure, they might be using social networking–or e-mail or phone or text or fax or whatever–to facilitate cheating. But you can’t wall off your partner’s exposure to other people, or monitor their communications, and expect that your relationship will automatically be infidelity-proof. Blaming social networking is just an easy distraction from addressing the real causes of cheating.

Via TJBNYC76 @ Flickr.

Ladies, I don’t know about you, but my junior high and high school years were fraught.  I was nerdy, sharp-tongued, barely dated and was much more interested in reading and studying than in drinking, partying or boys. The Queen Bees of my high school did not have much use for me and my bookishness and unstylish clothes, and they let me know it.  When I first read Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye, a shiver of recognition ran down my spine and a few faces from junior high swam in front of me. I don’t look back on my teenage years with any pleasure; you’ll never hear me fondly reminiscing about them as “the best years of my life.” (I’ve always thought that anyone who said that must have shipped out to a war zone or a maximum security prison immediately after graduation).  

But at 17 I graduated and went off to college, where I found plenty of like-minded geeks, had a couple serious boyfriends, and then moved to New York City, where the dating took off like a rocket and the bookishness provided me with steady, fulfilling employment. I created a truly happy, satisfying life for myself, but aside from a small handful of close friends, I never kept up with anyone from high school, nor did I ever look up anyone during my frequent visits home. Looking back, I suspect that my unpleasant teenage experiences were vital to my adult success—they helped me develop a thick skin, self-reliance, a good bullshit detector, and an ability to say “fuck you” and walk away where appropriate.  All of this proved extremely handy when I moved to New York and entered a hyper-competitive, often bitchy, industry.

Yet, oddly enough, when I joined Facebook a year ago, the first people to send me friend requests were girls—women, now—from high school. I hadn’t talked with any of them in at least 15 years.  How they found me, I’m not sure. But when they did, I was torn. On one hand, I was wildly curious to know where life had taken them, and on the other I was confused, and slightly irritated. Why did they want to be friends now, after being so unfriendly in high school?  But my curiosity got the best of me, and I clicked “accept”, figuring I could always find out what they were up to and then quietly de-friend them later.

What happened next came as a total shock.  It turned out that these girls had grown up into nice women.  Most of them were married, with children, which I am not.  The vast majority were still living in or around where we grew up, which I am not.  They were as different from me as adults as they’d been when we were teens. But all of them expressed real pleasure at having reconnected, and I was suddenly swamped with compliments: “You look amazing!” and “You were always so smart!” and “I totally envied you back then because you were so confident!”  O rly?  That’s not quite how I remember it, girls. It’s odd how despite my success and happiness in my adult life, a mere whiff of those teenage years pulls me right back into my defensive, 15-year-old, fuck-you mindset.

But despite my initial cynicism, I came to realize that their friendliness and desire to reconnect were genuine.  I took the compliments and ran with them, and discovered that whatever nasty mean-girl demons had possessed these women as teenagers, they were for the most part fully exorcised.  To my surprise I discovered real, unexpected pleasure revisiting our shared experiences.  Two of the women who frequently drop by my Facebook page were my best friends in 8^th grade—we had a tight little clique of mall-ratting and phone-calling and sleepovers when I was 13.  By high school, however, they’d dropped me, almost overnight and without any explanation. I think they found me too serious and geeky when the high school partying and boy-chasing began in earnest.  The rejection stung at the time, but I found different friends, and hadn’t thought about them in years, until they both friended me on Facebook.  One is now a successful lawyer in Florida, the other an active full-time mom in my hometown.  They both have adorable kids and seem happy and it’s been a delight to chat with them and share our lives in this casual, on-line way.  Go figure.  If you had told me all this would happen back when I graduated high school and left town for good, I would have laughed in your face (or, more likely, flipped you the bird).  Life is strange.  But I’m thankful to Facebook for reconnecting me, and for, in many ways, redeeming my teenage years and the girls I spent them with.