The Kids' Table

If you were raised in a large extended family you remember it--the kids' table, the sequestered plank where you were eye-balled to behave from afar and treated like clique or not to clique up close. I was never in the clique, regardless of the family side I attended, which is why I guess California fits me--there are no kids and there is no table. I sit here on the couch and watch birds fly across the rare-in-December-blue sky.

On-line, it's a bit different.

It's no secret that I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook--hmm, no, wait, that should probably be redefined. I have a habit/hate relationship with Facebook. I keep tuning in every day hoping I won't feel stupid and childish because the following:

• I'm single
• I'm in a job that I'm not effective in, and therefore...
• I'm in a job that I hate
• I love the City that I live in
• I love the music that I do
• I love movies
• I love books

Facebook, someone explained to me once, is to see the extended family and friends that you could never keep up with otherwise. No more e-mails! No more phone calls! No more letters! (A letter? People still write those? Happily for me, some still do.) Just post a status and everyone will know what you're up to! In fact, not only will everyone know what you're up to, but they will RESPOND, that is if they are truly cool or truly love you.

Sort of like a sick combination of the questionnaire that went around in study hall ("what do you think of Sarah?") and the kids table, where everyone else talks about the cool thing they got for Christmas while you got a dollhouse handmade from your dad but not really a COOL present in modern day society.

I keep trying though, to post interesting stuff--movie reviews, and, up until a few weeks back, my reading site was posting to Facebook. Now only Twitter takes all this stuff with a smile. Facebook seems to bleeding exclusivity, like the Yankees or Tiffany's, and it keeps me away. Twitter is thought in motion, a world of people free to read me, only one of which I've met and yet--they seem to accept me. I don't read Twitter hoping to have been read--I read Twitter in happy eagerness to the other people I can relate to.

Facebook? Strangely, Facebook seems like one big mirror with all of my imperfections magnified, like sitting at the kids' table, having knocked the table leg and spilled a little of everyone's water, and a dollhouse in my memory while the rest of the world had Walkmans.

Walk away from the habit. Onward.