Wordsmoker

Well, that’s it. The world is over. My mother is trying to “friend” me on Facebook. We had a good run people, but it’s time to cast off earthly possessions, climb into the hills, and wait for the Beast to rise and the earth to be rent in twain. If you need me, I’ll be cleansing my profile with holy fire and praying for intercession from Saint Jude.

Here’s the thing: it’s not like I have a whole lot of secret Truth Commission type shit on my Facebook page, just waiting to be blown wide open like the Ken Starr report, but I do not need my mother reading sex jokes on my profile, or looking at drunken photos of me cage-dancing at my roommate’s birthday party, or calling me and saying, “One of your friends made a comment about a ‘Cleveland Steamer’ on your page. What’s that? Is that food?”

Anyway, this all started rather innocently – JUST LIKE THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS – when my mother first heard about That Facebook. (Everything with my mother is “that [blank]” by the way, like some hereditary Germanic instinct still has the language center of her brain on permanent lockdown, assigning specifying articles to all possible nouns. “I feel so bad for That Sandra Bullock,” and, “Did you see That World Cup?” [Yes, *that* World Cup.]) Someone at her job foolishly mentioned it to her, and she decided to check it out.

At first it was amusing. Much like a kid who gets a Wii, but doesn’t realize that the box opens and instead spends an hour or two playing with the box itself before getting bored and putting it away on a shelf forever, she just sort of browsed the names of me and my friends for a while. THE END.

UNTIL.

My brother’s girlfriend joined Facebook and sent out friend requests to everyone in her address book, my mother included. My mom got the message and accepted, almost by accident, and then was immediately asked to start sending out requests of her own, carpet-bombing the internet with friend requests. Facebook made dozens, hundreds, of suggestions, and my mom just started clicking “Add” because she didn’t know what this was all about. She added MY FATHER AND STEPMOTHER. THEY DO NOT EVEN TALK IN REAL LIFE. My mother is like a blind woman with a gun. We’re all doomed.

She still has no idea how she did any of this. When she asked me how to “upload a profile picture”. I explained to her that she had to click ‘Delete Profile’ and then pour a glass of water over her keyboard, and that should do the trick. (No, but seriously, I literally spent thirty-five minutes walking her through how to add a picture to her profile, and now she is represented forever on the internets by the Windows logo because it was THE ONLY PICTURE ON HER DESKTOP and she cannot figure out how to change it again.)

Now, every day, I get a phone call to the tune of “I heard that your friend got That Shake Weight…could you ask her if it works?” (like I even need to go down the Oresteian black hole of psychological trauma that is picturing my MOM using a proxy masturbation tool to exercise,) and “What was your stepmother talking about the other day? Seems like everybody knew what she meant except for me.” I DO NOT NEED THIS AGGRAVATION, PEOPLE.

I am here to tell you, the Amish had the right fucking idea.