Life After Facebook
Have you ever been to a couple’s house with your wife, got an upset stomach from nerves or the gnawing sense that the greenish, off-colored meat they served you was undercooked or contaminated or both, had to suffer the great shame and anxiety of rushing to their bathroom several times, and then depleted their entire stock of Costco toilet paper? Worse than that, you later learned from mutual acquaintances that you clogged their toilet, found out they had to call a plumber at some late-night hour on a Sunday and that this greedy plumber charged them triple the normal cost for snaking their pipes and they could barely pay the plumber.
This couple who served you nauseating animal protein was now shouldered with a financial burden so debilitating they ended up being three months late on their car and mortgage payments resulting in a dreadful, “high-risk” credit rating. What is really sad about all this is that they were just about to buy a second car, and guess what? Their delinquent car and mortgage payments disqualified them for a low interest rate so they couldn't afford to buy that second car after all. And who was to blame? The guy who overstayed his welcome in their crapper, that’s who.
If this travesty wasn’t emasculating enough to my psyche already, then listen to this: This couple—who used to be good friends with my wife and me—cut ties with me. That’s right. They no longer want to be my friend and they gave finality to this act with the exclamation point of unfriending me on Facebook.
Things like this happen to me all the time. My friends list is dwindling. At this rate, losing about a friend a month, next October I’ll be completely friendless.
On a related note, Facebook has already deleted my account because the amount of people who unfriended me was far greater than the amount who had accepted me on their friends list. To make a long story short, I've been permanently banned from Facebook and in spite of my repeated email inquiries no one at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto will get back to me.
The above isn’t true, of course, but my not having friends—and a shrinking friends list on Facebook—is producing these types of defeatist thoughts, which I often share with my wife Lara in spite of her constant plea for me to keep my self-pitying ruminations to myself.
Desperate to reconcile with the couple whose plumbing I had single-handedly ruined, I called them and left a message, explaining that I missed their friendship terribly, and that as a sign of good will I offered to co-sign on their car loan (I have the highest FICO score attainable) so they could get a cheaper rate, but they didn't return my dozen calls in which I emphasized my sterling FICO rating would get them the car they wanted.
I then tried another strategy: I sent them $100 gift cards for Target, iTunes, Amazon, Home Depot, and Olive Garden, but my profuse generosity failed to move them. I worry they were insulted by the fact that I assumed they’d actually go to the Olive Garden.
I brought up this concern with Lara, but she dismissed this explanation. Even a gift card to a trendy bistro would have failed to get me the desired response, she said. They had been looking for an excuse to dump me for a long time. It was now time for me to let go, to take this loss on the chin, and to move on with my life.
I knew Lara’ advice to be sound, but I sulked for a few weeks during which time I had a recurring dream that I was a star NFL kicker. I would make these unbelievable long-distance, game-winning field goals before being carried off the field as I was covered with a snowstorm of confetti. The dream become more and more vivid so that I’d awake feeling like a football hero. There seemed to be a message: “You can do this. You can make a comeback.” I dismissed the Message as a deranged voice talking to me in my sleep. But the Message, along with the dreams, kept getting stronger and stronger. There was no denying that the Mike Manderlin Comeback was imminent.
So I went to the Prospect College football field during tryouts and told my long-time friend Coach Tanner to let me kick from the fifty-yard line. I’ve allowed Coach Tanner to stick a bunch of his players in my English classes over the last fifteen years and he owed me a favor. He laughed and told me to give the football a ride. I kicked the football and it went through the middle of the goal posts. I gave it another kick from sixty yards out and it went through again. Coach Tanner looked flummoxed. “Jesus, Manderlin, I knew you kicked in high school, but I didn’t know you still had it in you.”
“I’ve gotten into shape,” I explained. I was referring to the forty pounds I had lost and my religious daily ritual of power yoga since my doctor said that losing weight would elevate my testosterone and reduce my bad cholesterol. As I was explaining my weight loss, Tanner was on his cell telling someone about a middle-aged English professor with a leg made of gold. Within minutes, a throng of thrill seekers showed up, other coaches mostly. I kicked the ball through the goal posts from seventy yards and they said I should try out for the NFL. They could call the right people.
The buzz about my kicking leg was big. Reporters showed up the next day on the field and some scouts. All the while I was thinking this weird thought that came out of nowhere: If I can really pull this off and become an NFL kicker, I’ll for the first time in my life have more Facebook friends than my wife. No doubt, I’ll amass Facebook’s 5,000-friend limit and I’ll be able to delete any loser inviting me to play those stupid Facebook games, Bubble Shooter, Pokemon Tower Defense, Trollface Launch, Whack Your Boss, knowing there were thousands waiting in line to be my friend.
But my comeback wasn’t meant to be. As I was about to kick the ball in front of my audience, I pulled up lame, feeling a slight pull in my hamstring. I tried again the next day but there was another mishap. I was stung by a bee in the cheek and because I’m allergic to bee stings I have to carry an epinephrine auto-injector. The problem is that the drug had expired, over six months ago, and my left cheek began to swell to twice its size. I had to be rushed to the health center and receive cortisone and adrenaline treatments.
A few days later, Coach Tanner had arranged for me to give another demonstration, but this time my planting foot went into a mole hole, I twisted abruptly and in my contorted position my inner thigh squashed my left testicle, rendering it as flat as a pancake before I fell to the ground and curled into the fetal position. Coach Tanner looked down at me in contempt. “You’re like that frog cartoon who sings and dances in the shoe box but goes silent when its owner tries to show it off to everyone else. Stop wasting my time, Manderlin.”
My dreams of being a kicker, and maxing out on Facebook, were over. Also I noticed that Coach Tanner was no longer on my Facebook Friends List. He had, as it turned out, unfriended me.
I was contemplating losing yet another Facebook friend in my office the other day, trying to hold back my tears, while giving tutelage to Oscar, one of my composition students whom I mentor through the college’s Puente Program. I was telling Oscar my “life story” for his essay about his Puente mentor, somewhat distracted by my depressing, unfriendable situation, when a green, winged six-inch cockroach scurried under the chair Oscar was sitting on. I recoiled and screamed, not unlike a woman. Desperate to kill the roach, I picked up a can of WD-40 and sprayed the grotesque bug. The spray didn’t seem to deter it. Rather, the spray covered with the gargantuan roach with a shiny sheen and made it look pissed off that I had subjected it to such abuse. It got on its hind legs as if ready to challenge me to a boxing match. It seemed to be saying, “You want a piece of me!” I let out another scream, more falsetto than the previous one, and threw an old dictionary at the roach. That got its attention. It fled, disappearing under the book shelf.
Oscar is a Marine who’s been to Iraq and Afghanistan. He would have remained calm during the cockroach crisis had I not screamed like a woman, a fact that did not go unnoticed. The burly Marine said, “Nothing depletes a surplus of masculinity as screaming at the sight of a bug. Even a large one as that. I’d start thinking about the road to redemption if I were you.”
Oscar wasn’t waiting for me to take that road. That night, I noticed he had unfriended me.
In bed, I turned toward Lara and told her I was falling down a social black hole and I saw no bottom. It all started with that first couple who blamed me for ruining their credit.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” she said. “And stop talking about all this doom.”
“But it’s all there on Facebook. It lets you see your shitty ever-shrinking Friends List.”
“Fuck Facebook,” she said. “It’s not reality. Can’t you just let go of it and think about the real things in life worth appreciating?”
I thought her question over, but my mind was blank.
“Come on,” she pressed. “Give me one thing.”
“Okay. Since taking psyllium husk fiber supplements, my toilet paper consumption is down ninety-eight percent.”
The next morning, I remembered the words of Seneca who wrote (and I paraphrase) that people who sat on their asses all day waiting for the world to love them would die lonely. That’s what I was doing, waiting for people to friend me on Facebook and to massage my ego by saying they “liked” my posts. I decided to get off my ass for once and do something, to give back to this aching, grieving world which depended on my strength, compassion, and fortitude.
I remembered while being treated for my bee sting a notice in the health clinic about a blood drive. I could go on Facebook, search Prospect College’s Blood Drive, click “like,” and I’d have all the necessary information. In the process, I even became Facebook friends with the drive’s supervisor nurse Nancy Stevenson. My first pint of blood went fine. I was brave, talkative with the other donors, and in general remained upbeat, even accepting their offer of grape juice and cookies when I was finished. However, my second appearance didn’t work so well. There was a new nurse with a severe face and a Scottish accent who put the needle in my vein in this way that both felt crooked and like it was sucking air into my vein. I was obsessing over these unpleasant sensations until I began to convulse. Nurse Stevenson rushed into the room, lowered me so my feet were elevated over my head, and told me I had just had a flight-fight response, a reaction that happens to one out of twenty donors. As I slowly sat up, I could feel the wet hairs on the back of my legs sticking to the vinyl recliner. Where I was once supine there was now a puddle of perspiration. Nurse Stevenson and the Scottish nurse both frowned at the sweat upon which Stevenson said, “Had to wear shorts, did you?” Shortly after her contemptuous words, sometime later that evening, Nurse Stevenson had unfriended me.
I was down to one Facebook friend, Alesky Jasek. He was my best friend of course. A Polish immigrant who works in advertising in San Francisco, Alesky, has known me for over twenty years. We rarely talk anymore or even do any Facebook communication. The last time we spoke, he complained he no longer had friends, that his high-pressure job at a prominent branding company took up all of his time.
You should nurture and cherish what you have, my wife always tells me, so I gave Alesky a call at his office one afternoon. When I called, he sounded very excited. “Oh my God,” he said. “I’m looking out the window right now and I can see my boss arguing with a parking meter enforcement officer over a parking ticket. Jesus Christ! My boss just punched him and now another officer is putting cuffs on him. Do you know what this means?”
“What?” I asked.
“A job promotion!”
I was stunned by the quick turn of events and didn’t know what to say. Alesky apparently interpreted my awkward silence in a negative light. “Aren’t you excited for me?” he said.
“Of course I am.”
“You don’t sound it.”
We talked back and forth about how his boss’s arrest would make the job opening Alesky had been looking for, but I couldn’t convince him that I was happy for him. I really was glad to see him get the promotion he deserved, but hearing about his boss punching a meter cop in broad daylight had a surreal quality that my emotions couldn’t keep up with. In any event, during the next day or so Alesky had unfriended me. That was it. I now had zero Facebook friends. My Facebook account was now superfluous, a web page devoted to loneliness, naval-gazing, and solipsism. It was too much to bear.
I deleted my Facebook account and sat in my office chair absorbing the shock of what I had just done when my wife approached me with two humungous cantaloupes. I’m the official Smeller for finding all things ripe and Lara wanted to know which one of the melons was the ripest. I began to smell each one when Lara said, “Jesus, dude, you don’t have to get all aggressive and rub the tip of your nose in them. You should look at your nose. It’s all scratched up.”
“I’m just trying to get a good smell.”
“What, by wiping your wet nose hairs all over them? It’s disgusting.”
I pointed to one of the cantaloupes and said, “That one. It smells sweeter.”
She was about to walk back to the kitchen when I told her to stop and brace herself for something extremely important.
“Don’t tell me you’re having an affair,” she said.
“No,” I said. “It’s about my Facebook account. I deleted it.”
“Thank God,” she said.
“What about you?” I asked. “Will you delete your account?”
“Hell, no. I love Facebook. I love chatting with my family and friends. But for you it’s something else entirely. It’s a disease.”
I knew she was right. I said, “That’s it then. I’m starting a new life without Facebook.” I was standing up now, overcome with the urge to take off all my clothes and run around the house.
“Mike?” Lara winced.
“What?”
“Why is there a booger on my cantaloupe?”
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