Every moment, every nugget of time, every snippet of every second carries me farther and farther away from high school. This is one of the best things about adult life.
I will not bore you and tell you that my high school sucked. It seems that almost everyone worth talking to these days had a shitty time in high school. Let's just say I was plain, normal, smart-but-not-the-smartest, and largely ignored. Wanted to be cool like the goths and wanted to date the point guard on the basketball team (I, of course, never saw that these two things would never go together). Never had a date in those formative years, unless you count my two proms where I asked both guys to go with me.
My point is, I'm past that.1 Happily married, one kid, pursuing my dream, good friends, all that stuff.
However.
After 9 years of being online, I'm convinced that the Internet is just a big high school. And I'm not even talking about 35-year-old men chatting "A/S/L? UR K001. LOL!11!!!1!" I joined LiveJournal to allow people to read my innermost thoughts and comment on them. "How insightful she is," they'll think. "My, you are funny, Mur," they'll comment. Or perhaps they'll see that the post already has 50 comments and I will never read or respond to their comment. And they'll slink away dejectedly the way I do when I read Wil Wheaton's blog.
I started my journal. The above didn't happen. I mean, I got some comments here and there, but not the deluge I had hoped my brilliance would garner. I made a friends list, with a small amount of anxiety rising every time I added someone to my friends list, hoping that they would add me back. I learned that you can pour your heart into your blog and no one will answer, but if you mention that the weather sucks everyone will jump on board.
I got over most of the LJ stress, although I am still wondering about the passive-aggressiveness of removing friends. It seems the pinnacle of rudeness to send someone an email saying "I'm taking you off my friends list because you're boring/inflammatory/annoying/not the person I thought you were." Then again, it seems the pinnacle of passive-aggressiveness if you take them off your list and don't mention it, hoping they don't troll their friends' list semi-obsessively (like me) and notice it right away.
Then I got an invite to join Orkut. I'm not really sure what the point is to this "service" is. You list your friends, and you get to see your friends' friends and network and all that. It sounds like we're all getting cliquey in the cafeteria and we can see who will hang out with whom. Who has the most friends, who is lame with few friends, and who wants to see hot Spike/Angel sex (as discussed in the Spike community on Orkut).
And, the best part, you can rate your friends. You can give them little points that say that they're cool (portrayed by a somewhat obscure blue square that is supposed to be an ice cube), "trusty" (happy faces) and sexy (little hearts). You can also have people listed as your fans.
Upon learning this, I began to panic. What if my friends didn't think I was cool, "trusty" or sexy? What if I start comparing myself to others and find myself lacking? Am I a less-cool person than they are? Am I the friend they hang out with so they will look cooler? Or more "trusty?" And what the hell is "trusty" anyway? Trustworthy?
I started thinking about Valentine's Day at school, where they sold carnations on school property and the most popular girls were always getting roses delivered to them and buckets of carnations. Not me. I mooned over my crushes and dreamed of getting a flower, which never happened. I definitely didn't get any "sexy" heart icons handed to me in high school.
My mature mind (what little I had) scoffed at the "sexy" anxiety. I mean, I have tried very hard to keep pictures of myself off the Internet, so it's unlikely any of my net friends would think I'm sexy. And anyway, I'm married. Do I really want lots of people to label me as sexy? Wouldn't that be awkward? Course, I don't want them to think I'm a dog either. Thank goodness there isn't "sucks", "tool" and "dog" icons to award your friends. I'd probably stay awake all night checking to make sure how many "sucks" and "dogs" I would collect in an hour period.2
I have deadlines. I have a baby to take care of and TiVo to watch. I have things to do. And yet I spend time worrying about Orkut. I have nightmares about finding a date for the prom (and failing). This website is not good for me.
One might think the best thing for me would be to take my high-maintenance anxiety away from this stress and just delete my profile and stop the worrying. As my good friend Wil (who won't add me to his friends list 'cause, well, he doesn't know me, and who can blame him) pointed out on his blog, you also can't delete your profile without mailing their admin. And they'd appreciate if you tell them why you don't want to belong. "Don't leave the club! We really like you! No, really! We need you to be the backup in case the cool kids can't come!"
I think I'll just tell them that I graduated in 1991 from Orkut, and would rather not return.
1. For the most part. I mean, is it obvious I'm still a tad bit bitter? 
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