MyFace, or is it SpaceBook?

Anyone who knows me well, and that could be any one of half a dozen people outside my immediate family of one, knows that I'm somewhat sociably challenged. In fact, as I've aged, I've actually grown profoundly sociably challenged, but I've been trying to keep that to myself. I admit this now not from shame or pride, but as everyone says these days, it is what it is!

So what am I doing signing up on a social networking site? Well, although I may be sociably challenged, I have a healthy, or perhaps even unhealthy, quotient of curiosity about other human beings. And therefore I've created a profile (Note the badge on my blog!) and have even managed to acquire some friends. What do I do next? There's this feature, as everyone now must know, that lets you present to the online world, or at least that part of it allowed to see your profile, "what you are doing right now." My first instinct is always to say, "Michael is looking at his profile again." But that sounds so pathetic, and so self absorbed. Or, would it be any better to say "Michael is reading posts from his friends," which is, I suppose, the main reason for returning to the site from time to time?

Admittedly, social networking is a nice diversion, and unlike other forms of web surfing, this one at least lets you peek in on people you may actually know, as well as on the people that they know but you don't, their other friends who as it turns out always seem so much more interesting than you would have thought. And everyone else, not being sociably challenged the way I am, seems to be engaged in some interesting activity, as well as at the same time reporting on it minute by minute to all of their friends, who are also responding with spontaneous and witty comments, frequently within only a matter of minutes, if not seconds.

I don't know why, perhaps it's because like Freud (or was it Groucho Marx or Woody Allen) I never want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member, but for some reason I'm always pleasantly surprised to discover that my friends know other people who would appear to be even more witty, depraved, confused, funny, etc. than I am. This discovery, however (and perversely), then contributes to my challenged sociability. I find myself in some feedback loop refreshing the page to see what everyone else is doing, while I am doing nothing other than reading about what others, many of whom I do not actually know personally, are up to while looking at this same page I'm looking at.

Okay, enough of this. I've got to get back and check my profile.