I am a total daydreamer. I'm always creating stories and inventing situations in my mind. I'm also often thinking of what might've been. Thinking of the people who have passed through my life and imagining what they're doing and where they're doing it. But the dreaming has stopped since Facebook entered my life. There's really no use imagining my hot seventeen-year-old boyfriend as an athletic grown man working as a professor at some small liberal arts college when I can log on to FB and learn instantly that he is... "having a case of the Mondays" from his bureaucratic office downtown. And I no longer have to wonder if that hot midwestern TA I once knew is sipping a latte in a cool coffee house, browsing a copy of Wuthering Heights, lost in thought (maybe about me) because I know he's not. Instead he's "off to the Tigers game with the kids."
Don't get me wrong, I am not a Facebook hater. I really do love how it connects me with my friends from all over the world so that I can keep up with their lives and see photos of their ever-expanding families. I find it amusing to read what my close friends are up to even though I probably already know or could call and find out. The part of Facebook I'm having trouble with are the faces that I'm not supposed to have daily contact with--the exes, the strangers who for a brief time touched my life and then exited without a trace. Thanks to over-friendly Facebook, there is now a clear-cut trace leading directly to each and every one of them. Those likes, loves and lusts of long ago are easier to find than Hansel and Gretel.
So you find them or they find you. And then what? Idle chitchat. Obligatory catching up. Followed by awkwardness. Do you keep the conversation going or go radio silent? Are you telling too much or too little? Should you allude to a shared memory or keep it light and airy? Suddenly, this person who once filled a meaningful spot in your past is colliding with your present. To me, it feels like a betrayal of the time continuum. It's messing with the universe. And it starts messing with my head.
I've always known my imagination was far extending but now I realize that it needs its own passport. My invented ideas of what had become of my first walk-of-shame, that passionate indie director who once crossed my path and my college crush are so completely fantastic and enjoyable. The pictures I've conjured in my head are exquisite if I do say so myself. But thanks to Facebook's technology-made-easy, I now have too many real pictures (one click does it) of actual people doing grown-up life stuff like taking kids to Disneyland, coaching soccer games and the worst--posing for corporate photos with a lot less hair than I remember.
So much of adult life is designed to squash our inner-dreamers, our imagination and creativity. Every day is a fight between my dreamer and the real world. I guess Facebook is simply my newest challenge. And challenging it is to get used to the heartthrobs of my youth complaining of lower back pain and midnight baby feedings.
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