Tuesday, May 20, 2014

A Lil Unfriending

So my Facebook friend list is pretty big. Big for me, probably not big for other people. Whatever.

I have several lists to which I assign anyone who requests my ‘friendship.’ These lists include, 5p-, high school, Chicago, IU and, of course, family. There are others but since I don’t have Facebook up right this second and I’m lazy, I don’t remember them all.

Anyway, there are people on that list I will never meet face to face. There are people I met a hundred years ago (or, you know, back in high school) whom I will never see again.

Last week, I was reading through the updates on my Facebook home page. Alyssa was reading over my shoulder.

I came across an update in which the ‘friend’ wrote ‘lil’ at least three times. ‘Lil’ makes me just a little crazy. Why are those three extra letters so hard to type?

I mean, come on! I also hate prolly for probably and many other cheats when it comes to text-speak.

But for now, we’re talking about ‘lil.’ I grumbled a little about the laziness of people these days and how irritating that very update was. Then it hit me. I don’t have to see posts like that. I checked to see how I even knew this person. She was an acquaintance from high school. She hadn’t even been in my class, she’d either been a year or two ahead of me or behind me. We’d never actually been friends, even when we saw each other in the halls at school. We were, at best, nodding acquaintances.

I unfriended her. I didn’t know this woman. I will probably never see her again and reading ‘lil’ three times in a single status update was too much for my brain at that moment.

Alyssa expressed what was probably an unreasonable amount of glee at my unceremonious unfriending. She was impressed that my desire to not read lazy, inane status updates trumped my desire to have a high friend number (which wasn’t hard to do, I really don’t care how many ‘friends’ I have on Facebook, to the point that I rarely extend a friend request but will usually accept one if sent to me.)

But that lil was too much for me. It just was.

Alyssa told my mom about this little unfriending incident and my mom joked that she was going to write something lil in her status. I declared that I’d unfriend her too. But…I probably wouldn’t. I might try to be funny and type, “Unfriended.”

Of course, my attempts at funny often fall short. Just a lil, but a lil is often just enough.

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