Facebook has done something to annoy me again. And no, I don’t mean the threats to change the privacy settings or the plan to charge users for every mouse click. I’m fine with all that.

The thing I find annoying is the list of people in the middle of the page who Facebook has decided I might want to add as friends. Facebook is not supposed be a place to find new friends; it’s supposed to be a place to connect with the friends you’ve already got so you don’t have to actually talk to them.

Friend, in the Facebook world, being an illusory term at best.

The friend Facebook wants to introduce me to are friends of friends or friends of friends friends, and in almost every instance, no one I’ve ever heard of. Sort of friends once removed. So I ignore the suggestion. It’s hard enough to keep track of cousins once removed, or even to understand what they have been removed from, without having to categorize other people.

(Grammatical side-rant: “Once removed” is redundant. A cousin, or
anything other than a cat, cannot be twice removed. She’s either removed or she’s not).

Every year or so, when I was feeling even more curmudgeonly than usual, I would look through the list of Facebook friends I have accumulated, and cull the herd. It’s not something I had to do. If people consistently post idiotic claptrap (like this post for instance), I boot them right away. So what is left are the people who aren’t overtly offensive. But I sorted through it anyway. Just, because.

First to go were the people from work who, for some god-forsaken reason, I felt compelled to friend. Most of what they post are things they are compelled to post, by work. They’re gone from my list because, with a retirement date in sight, I have less and less reason to be appropriate.

If you know me—that is to say if you’re on my friends list—you know that I’ve never had any patience for doing the appropriate thing. So just imagine what I’m like now.

(Grammatical side-rant two: Facebook has made friend a verb. Another loss for the language. You no longer have to “make a friend.” You just “friend.” “I friended her.” And to think I was sure we had hit bottom when “effort” and “task” were made into  verbs. “We’re efforting that right now.” “He’s been tasked with efforting that.”)

Next to go are the people who post pictures without explaining what they are pictures of or who is in the picture or why they are significant, interesting or out of focus. I don’t know who those people in the picture are, whose wedding they are attending, where they are vacationing or what that symbol is on your front yard. After all, who do you think you are, a friend?

You would think I would expunge the people who rarely post anything, because, they’re just added baggage. But I am one of those people and I can’t be too hard on us.

So who does that leave? Well, there are the people who actually post interesting things. They’re keepers. I also keep the people who mostly post pictures of their kids and grandkids because, even though I don’t know the kids, you can’t delete kids or dogs. It’s just wrong. Cats, on the other hand…

Curiously, I keep the people who only post memes they have clipped from somewhere else. You know the ones; they look like they were made by American Greetings. A pencil sketch and a piece of short wisdom in Helvetica. It’s always the kind of thing George Carlin used to say, even though it turns out George Carlin never said most of the things he used to say. The stuff that makes you wish you had thought of that. Once in a while I read one that I had thought of, but I’m not good enough at graphics to make it into a post.

I do find these cut and paste memes annoying. I’d rather read what people have to say for themselves. But I’m willing to put up with them because I have no interest in going to whatever those sites are to find that stuff for myself.

I keep some friends just to bulk up the list. One of the few things I post, other than sarcastic and annoying comments about other peoples’ posts, is a link to these infrequent blog posts. I’m still childish enough—or perhaps I am once again childish enough—to watch anxiously to see how many people read my blografitti. Through diligent study of search engine optimization and marketing this blog now has a loyal and deeply disturbed readership in the mid-10s. For that I have my Facebook friends to thank.

And that gets me down to the last list. My actual friends. It’s a very short list. And getting shorter. But I keep them. I’m funny that way.