Two’s company. Three’s a crowd. And whoever they are, I don’t trust them. Yes, in the ever expanding list of things I don’t ”get”, the most crippling entry has to be people.
I don’t get people. What’s their appeal, precisely? They waddle around with their haircuts on, cluttering the pavement like gormless, farting skittles. They’re awful.
As you might imagine, I’m somewhat socially inept. Slide me between two strangers at any light-hearted jamboree and I’ll either rock awkwardly and silently on my heels, or come out with a stone-cold conversation-killer like, ”This room’s quite rectangular, isn’t it?” I glide through the social whirl with all the elegance of a dog in high heels.
A friend once tried help by coaching me in small talk. Step one: take note of what day it is. On a Monday or Tuesday, ask what they got up to at the weekend. Thursday or Friday, ask if they’ve got any plans for the coming weekend.
”What about Wednesdays?” I asked, wide-eyed. ”Oh, for Christ’s sake. Just ask what they do for a living.”
That Friday, I attended a reasonably sized get-together and boldly stood in the corner, trying to avoid everyone and everything. When this plan failed, I tried out my newfound small-talk skills. But having dealt my opening gambit, I drifted off, gazing at eternity as their wobbling faces outlined their weekend plans in punishing detail. I didn’t care what they were doing at the weekend — nor, indeed, whether they lived or died.
Afterwards my friend asked how the party had gone. I complained that the key to small talk had merely opened a door on a world of tedium.
”Well, duh,” they said. ”No one really cares what anyone else is getting up to. Why do you think it’s called small talk? It’s just shit you say to make things less awkward.” What, just a pointless noise you make with your mouth? ”Precisely,” they said. And I thought: I hate this world. This stinking, unbearable world.
Fast-forward several years until you hit now. Then rewind a few weeks. Some of my friends tell me they’ve signed up to Facebook. It’s a bit of silly fun, they say. So I sign up too. Even misanthropes hate feeling left out. Facebook, for the uninitiated, is ”a social utility that connects you with the people around you”. It’s like a streamlined, refined take on MySpace. You create a profile for yourself, locate other people you know, and add them as ”friends”. You can then swap messages, share photos, invite one another for drinks, and so on. There’s also a status window you can easily update, so if your friend Dave is feeling pensive, he types in ”feeling pensive” and you see a little bulletin saying, ”Dave is feeling pensive”. For some reason, this is endlessly amusing. My friends were right: it was a bit of silly fun.
There was one drawback. Being on Facebook involves submitting yourself to cheerful, yet merciless surveillance. Your friends can automatically see more or less everything you’re doing — who else you’re making friends with, and so on — and vice versa. So when a girl I’d once been semi-involved with but oh-dear-that-ended-badly added me as a friend, I found myself confronted with an unrelenting, up-to-the-minute news feed of her fantastic new life and her fantastic new man, replete with photos. It doesn’t yet treat me to an automatic update each time they have sex, although that feature can’t be far off.
Anyway, last week I mentioned my burgeoning Facebook obsession in print. This was my first mistake. By the end of the day I had received several hundred ”friend requests”, mainly from students so desperate to escape the tedium of revision they’d idly befriend literally anyone.
When someone sends you a friend request, you’re confronted with three options: ”confirm”, ”reject” or ”send message”. Confirming all of them would make it hard for me to find my real friends among the influx of strangers. Coldly hitting ”reject”, however, seemed far too mean. Most of them were smiling.
Instead, I chose ”send message”, and invited them to join a group I’d set up for people I didn’t really know. This was my second mistake. People who signed up wondered what my plan was (I didn’t have one), while others refused, and instead sent me messages pointing out how pathetic it is to smugly fish for new Facebook friends, then arrogantly shove anyone who applies into a custom-made holding pen. Besides, in Facebook terms, several hundred people isn’t that many. ”You’re not exactly top of the range,” rasped one irritated ex-admirer.
So, for the sake of a bit of silly fun, I’ve generated a roster of wannabe friends I can’t reply to, organised a small group of people baffled by my motives, and convinced several perfect strangers that I’m a conceited, desperate prick. In other words, it’s comforting to know my crashing social ineptitude adapts in line with technology. I can be awkward and useless anytime, anywhere. Even when pixellated, there’s no bloody stopping me. — Â