UnfriendEd (O)

I run a tight ship when it comes to Facebook. I regularly pare down my friends list and I rarely keep non-family members that don't add value to my life (either in real life or Facebook life) on as friends. Not that every time I unfriend someone it means I actively dislike them, but my Facebook friends list generally reflects my real life.

Much of the time when I unfriend someone they know it's coming, and most of the time they don't know it's coming they don't seem to even notice that I've unfriended them (for weeks, if ever)... which helps cement that I made the right choice in zapping them. (I saw one such former Facebook friend on the street the other night; I wasn't sure it was her, and then I thought, "OMG... what if she's pissed that I unfriended her 'lo, so many moons ago?" (I wish I thought exactly with that cadence and vocabulary...) Fortunately, she gave me a finger-wiggling "hello" and a smile that didn't reach her eyes and then we went our separate ways. It could have been worse.)

Because I keep my friends list rather tidy, I am attuned to being unfriended. I know, in other words, when I have one fewer friend than I had before, and by my nature I need to figure out who the unfriender is.

Sometimes it's someone who's hidden their profile, and sometimes it's a glitch in the Facebook system.

Sometimes, though... it's intentional.

This blog details some of those times.

Sometimes my blog rubs people the wrong way. While some might say that apathy is the worst result of writing (and I dislike hearing from my friends that my latest blog is boring *coughcoughWinnercough*), I think that there are far worse results: making my friends look bad, making myself look like a racist homophobic misogynist, or even misrepresenting my actual personality.

In spite of the risk of, say, implying that I am a racist homophobic misogynist, I often am willing to take that chance. You know, for the lolz.

One blog I wrote some time ago is The Unexpected Burded of Extraordinary Charm. It paints a picture of me being so awesome that it excused me walking out of a store with a security device still attached to a jacket I purchased. It was intended to be silly. But not everyone took it that way, I guess.

One of my Facebook friends posted a comment on the blog: "vanity at its finest". Maybe she really thought I was showing my true colors, or maybe she didn't like that Canberry was prominently featured. In any case, she un-fanned my blog and unfriended me on Facebook. I haven't heard from her since.

Oops.

Perhaps because I am pretty uninhibited about what I post on my Facebook wall, I sometimes forget that standard isn't shared by all my Facebook friends. Some time ago, I was Facebook friends with a woman I'd dated casually ("casually" in some regards, if that makes sense) and she seemed to have a pretty good/laid-back sense of humor.

Seemed to.

We'd been chatting off and on for a while and I was Facebook friends with both her and her roommate, and I felt pretty comfortable posting on either/both of their walls, because they seemed to "get" me.

Seemed to.

One day the roomie posted on my friend's wall something along the lines of, "I'm so glad that we got to [do whatever it was]! You're the best for helping me out!!"

And I responded, "She's definitely good for some things. ;)"

Maybe it was the winky. Maybe it was the straw the broke the back of a camel I didn't even know existed, but it was (as the first year Spanish students say) "bastante". Her roomie unfriended me. She blocked me on Facebook. I sent one "REALLY?!?" txt to her. And haven't heard from her since.

Oops, again.

One area of discord on Facebook is politics. I am not a very political person--I have my opinions, but am blessed/damned with the ability to see both sides of almost every issue, so I can muster no passion for political causes, and I certainly am not evangelical about anything other than the awesomeness of tacos and Teenage Fanclub.

There was a woman with whom I was friends on Facebook (a pattern developing, yes?), and she was a big dog person. Actually, a big animal person. I like dogs and kitties, but I'm not militant about it. This young woman worked in a vet emergency room and seemed to be all about animals.

(I am not sure, really, what she was like in real life. Unlike the rest of the people on this list, she was a "pure Facebook" play, as the startup crowd might call it if they tried to meet women in as many different avenues as possible. She was the sister of a friend of my friend, and I lured her into communicating with me. At least for a time.)

Her Facebook naturally reflected her commitment to animals. She posted pics of cute dogs she'd helped. She posted pics of her dogs. She posted about donation and service opportunities to help animals in need.

This is all cool with me, by the way. I respect people who have passion for what they do, and even if her message got a bit pushy, it was fine by me.

I guess it was fine until I ever so slightly challenged her world view.

She posted a status along the lines of, "The difference between dogs and humans is that you can always trust a dog" or "... never trust a human." Something like that.

I find that, to be honest, ridiculous, and I tried to subtly disagree by pointing out that many humans are trustworthy and that some dogs are no good. She sort of overreacted in her response, and I maybe should have let it go, but I pointed out that SHE worked in a situation where she put in a lot of effort to help dogs she doesn't even know, and that dogs lack the depth/capacity to do that sort of work.

Wrapping my point in a compliment, I thought, would make the message easier to handle.

The result? You may be able to guess...

She unfriended me on Facebook. I haven't communicated with her since.

Sometimes Facebook disagreements are aggravated by real life reactions. Much like with the previous chick, I got into hot water with another Facebook friend over animal rights statements. Unlike the previous woman, this person was someone I considered to be a real friend. Or at least something between an acquaintance and a friend... but not someone whom I'd only casually dated or knew because I thought she was cute after arriving on her page from her brother's friend's page.

I have not read Fast Food Nation. I haven't seen Super Size Me. I eat fast food occasionally and I don't want to see the fucked-up things that happen in the industry. I know it's not good for me, and I certainly know it's not pleasant for the animals who get killed in order to make the food.

Similarly, while I eat chicken and hamburger and all sorts of stuff from the grocery store, I don't want to SEE it being made. I don't want to hear the screams of the animals when they die or their glassy eyes as they just sit around, getting bigger and doomed to be slaughtered.

I don't want to see it because I don't find it pleasant, but also because I don't really care. I enjoy the NFL, but I don't enjoy seeing players running windsprints in practice, and I don't want to see them hurting themselves in the weight room. I enjoy water but I don't want to see it running over mud or dead animals rotting upstream before it gets purified and into my belly.

Life is unpleasant, and I know it. I don't need to be reminded of it.

My Facebook friend posted a link to a YouTube video about slaughterhouse processes, and had a comment along the lines of, "Before you eat another being, you MUST watch this!"

To which I replied, "Is celery a being?"

That did not go over well. She unfriended me.

But the story (such as it is) doesn't end there.

Within 48 hours (it might have been that night, it might have been the next night), I bumped into her outside of a bar. She and I "debated" the topic for about two minutes, and it ended with her saying, "I want to hit you in the face right now."

I don't know if I won or lost the debate, but I blocked her when I got home.

Fortunately, several months later we reached detente. She graciously apologized and I humbly accepted and we are Facebook friends once again.

The least expected unfriending I've received was some months ago. I hadn't posted anything outrageous. I hadn't had a blowup with a friend or insulted someone's dog or roommate or roommate's dog... and yet I was down a friend.

Some investigation revealed that it was my paternal grandmother.

I am fortunate enough to have super-cool grandmothers. I am not very guarded in my Facebook persona, and they're either open-minded enough to deal with it or they just don't pay attention to me altogether. Either way it's fine, right?

So when my paternal grandmother unfriended me, I was confused. I looked back through my recent wall posts. I looked at my recent pics. Other than a porn reference and a series of drunken pics of me with shaggy hair, there wasn't much that was potentially offensive.

I couldn't just call her, though. If she was actually mad, then I didn't want to face her wrath without any idea of what I was getting myself into. If she'd accidentally unfriended me, then I didn't want to make her feel bad or demonstrate that I was angst-ridden over it.

It was quite a pickle.

I let it sit for a couple of days and then I made a wall post and my sister and cousin and parents got involved. (It turned out that it was, indeed, accidental. She didn't know how she managed to do it, and was disproportionately apologetic. Or she's an excellent liar.)

And then I was Facebook friends with my grandma again, and Facebook life--for all its ups and downs--was once again good. :)

Potter

You know how things kind of snowball? Like, you do a little meth and then all of a sudden your teeth are falling out as you pose for a mug shot?

Well, I had something that snowballed. It started off little and then, by the end, it had taken on a life of its own.

First, though, know that I had never lived by myself until just over five years ago. I lived with my parents, and then roomies in college, then my parents again for a year, and then My Ex for the better part of a decade. It was only in early 2006 that I came home to an empty residence.

Well, almost empty.

I have, as you may know, three cats. I never intended to have three cats--especially not in a one bedroom apartment--but it just happened.

That's not the snowballing part, though.

When I was a kid, my parents would leave the house and we would leave music on. Why? I was told it was because the dog enjoyed it. I never really accepted that answer, and while I never fully understood it, I understand now that it was just a habit.

I had my own habit related to my pets, and it snowballed.

Houdini is my oldest cat. He's almost 13, a gray and white short hair. Truman is the middle, and he's 12 and orange and idiosyncratic. Potter was the youngest. He was black and fluffy and the friendliest of the kitties to anyone who came over and visited.

I had Potter put to sleep about an hour ago. But more on that in a moment.

Because I lived alone, except for my cats, I took to talking to them occasionally. Not full conversations, of course, but something above and beyond "Here, kitty, kitty!" and "Stop pooping on the carpet!". When I left for work (or karaoke, or to volunteer at one of the innumerable places that I so often do) I felt like I had to say SOMETHING. An apology for leaving them alone? An explanation for why I was gone so often?

I settled on something odd. Simple, but odd.

"Houdini, you're in charge."

I didn't say it every time I left, but most mornings I did. While there was never any specifics given for the responsibilities involved with being "in charge", Houdini was the natural fit for the job: Truman is too slow (mentally and physically) and Potter was too flighty.

Potter was the baby. He was only two years younger than Houdini, but for some reason he always struck me as markedly smaller and markedly less mature. Innocent, even.

(Anthropomorphism run amok!)

"Houdini, you're in charge" snowballed in my head into discussions and explanations of why Houdini was perpetually left as the feline overlord. I would occasionally argue against imaginary charges by Truman and Potter of discrimination.

Actually, it was only ever Potter. I guess even an imaginary Truman was too laid-back to have any ambition. Mr. Potts, though? My imaginary Potter wanted to be treated like a grown-up. He wanted responsibility.

I bargained with this imaginary Potter, telling him he was getting closer to earning the spot, and that it would be his some day.

Well, I was wrong.

It's Monday night and about 72 hours ago Potter started getting lethargic. He normally wandered all over the apartment, following me and checking out what I was doing. Jumping on the couch, then on my lap, then lying on the floor by the door. And then repeating the cycle.

He slowed Friday night and Saturday and by yesterday he was simply lying in one part of the apartment and then moving to lie somewhere else. He had his routines... but they were all out the window. There was something definitely wrong. He jumped, painfully for him it seemed to me, onto my lap last night as I was using my computer. He'd spent hours at a time there, and part of me worried that it would be the last time.

This evening I took him to the ER and it turns out he had a blockage and kidney issues and heart arrhythmia. It was going to cost thousands of dollars to fix him up in the short run, with absolutely no guarantees it wouldn't happen again.

I cried and I told the vet (who was crying herself; I have no idea how she could care so much about a cat that she had met minutes before) that I had to let him go.

I had Potter put to sleep about an hour ago. He was a great cat and I'm hopeful that he had a good life. I will miss him.