deFacebook

I think I've changed my mind about Facebook's annoying features: it's far too much fun to distort them from their original purposes. Take, for example, the "confirmation" feature when someone "friends" you. If someone wants to "friend" you, you receive, first, an email message that a request has come your way. Next, you click the Facebook link in your email, which takes you to Facebook itself. You log in and get taken to the "Confirm Requests" page; you take a look at the request(s) before you, and you hit either "confirm" (hooray! new friend!) or "ignore" (fuck off!).

If you hit "confirm," a new window opens up, allowing you to check off how, exactly, you and this cyberfriend know each other. Since the option "e-met through blogging" isn't available, the next closest option is "met randomly." If you click "met randomly," you are then invited to write about how you met. There seems to be an upper limit of a couple hundred characters, but this is enough for me to do my damage. Let the defacing of Facebook commence!

I behaved myself for the first several "friendings," but now my attitude is Fuck it, so I invent fantasy scenarios to describe how I've met certain Facebook friends.

Take Hardy and Tiny, who friended me just today. You newcomers may not know this, but Hardy and Tiny is the man who revolutionized the Koreablogosphere in the early double-aughts of this century by bringing all those sexy pics to our attention. He didn't invent yellow fever, but he was certainly one of the biggest vectors for it. H&T seems to have retired to a life of commenter-ing; in the meantime, many, many copycats have sprung up and attempted to fill in the immense vacuum his departure created. The result has been a (not-unwelcome) glut of Thong Thursdays and Snatch Saturdays and Twat Tuesdays for the mostly-male (and occasionally fausse-lesbienne) K-blog contingent to drool over-- not to mention the arrival of blogs that, like the original H&T, devote themselves entirely to the worship of the female form.* My sidebar image for H&T came off his early blog:

It was a real shame when I finally removed it.

H&T has corresponded with me on occasion; seems like a friendly enough fellow, not an axe-murderer type as far as I can tell. So... in answer to the Facebook question re: how we met, I wrote:

We were hatched from the same egg sac, and as larvae we often dined upon the same necrotic animal tissue... until that fateful day when Earth swept through a massive storm of cosmic rays, and we found ourselves mutated into ferocious supermaggots with a taste for fresh human flesh...

For reader HK, I wrote:

I was a young moisture farmer on Tatooine and H was living in the Jundland Wastes out beyond the Dune Sea. After I was attacked by sandpeople, H took me to her dwelling and gave me my father's lightsaber. Only later did I realize she had lied to me about my father, but by that point I had already become a member of her religious order.

For fellow blogger Joel, I wrote:

We used to run through the streets of downtown Seoul, biting grandmothers and kicking little children. We've also known poverty, back in the days of the IMF crisis when South Koreans were forced to live on a diet of trash can lids, dandruff, and used condoms, and the height of Myeongdong fashion was a dead cat draped across the shoulders.

For fellow blogger Jelly, I wrote:

We got into a massive brawl after we both tried to grab and eat the same booger hanging out of a coworker's nose.

For fellow blogger Brian (of Gangwon Notes), I wrote:

Brian and I were suicide bombers who went on many missions together.

For OMNI writer and editor Todd Thacker, I wrote:

Todd has tried several times to kill me. I think this is just his way of expressing friendship.

For the most evil blogger in Oz, I wrote:

We were trying to slaughter the same whale. Rory was gleefully hacking at its tail with an axe while I was gently making love to its blowhole. Neither of us noticed the other until the whale was dead. Whether it died from blood loss or asphyxiation has been a perennial matter of debate.

...and for one of the absolute nicest ladies I know (not to mention one of the loveliest), I wrote the following paragraph, which she hasn't confirmed, probably because she's too mortified to do so:

It took a few weeks to discover that C was the one who was slashing my car's tires every night. At first I was annoyed, but after a while I began to think it was kinda cute, so I simply stocked up on tires. Same goes for all that emphysemic rasping and hacking on my voicemail-- creepy at first, but sort of endearing after a few months.

Sorry, C. You deserve better. Next time I'm in the States, feel free to give me a sound beating, Catholic University-style.

And that, folks, is how we enjoy Facebook.

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*Feminists call this "objectification." Post-feminists know better: it's a special kind of power that women hold over men.


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