Navigating Facebook

Joining Facebook is a bit like parachuting into a strange country, only more so. There are some people I know but there are local customs that I know nothing about and I'm don't speak the language as well as I thought I did when I was practicing at home. Oh, and I broke my compass when I made landfall. (Or whatever it's called for parachuting. "Landfall" I got from all those years of reading SF.)

Anyway, here I am standing by the side of the road trying to read the map so that I can find a hotel and a hot meal. A hot bath wouldn't hurt either. Several very friendly people have offered me a ride but maybe that's not such a good idea. My flashlight mostly works excepts when it goes out for no real reason. And it's really loud here.

So - to change metaphors - I'm taking the same approach that Pekoe does when we move. I've come out of my cat carrier and I'm sniffing around a little bit while pretending that I'm not here and that you can't see me. Clearly, everyone can see me because as soon as I went live, they started poking me and zombie attacking me and giving me little green things for my garden patch. And I've continued to react like Pekoe: I just stare at them without moving. Later, I swatted at them a bit with my paw and sniffed at them. So, Facebook-wise, I'm not hiding under the bed, but I'm not letting anyone pick me up either. I have a rubbed up against a couple of pieces of furniture, though, to mark my new territory.

As of right now I have 11 li'l green patch requests and 13 other requests pending. Last Sunday I told Denise - who is far more tech forward than I am - that I felt a little overwhelmed, and she said that she did, too, and was ignoring everything until she figured it out. Good enough for Denise, good enough for me.

So here's what I'm dealing with at the moment:

1. I figured out poking, which is basically Facebook for "Hi!," rather than, say, the more perpendicular sense in Arcadia. So poking is fun. Not yet sure about superpoking or any of the other variants.

2. I have a zombie, but I don't know what the etiquette is for feeding people to other people or biting people, so my zombie is bored and lonely right now. This could be a problem if my zombie starts wrecking stuff because it didn't have anything constructive to do.

3. My li'l green patch is dry and bare. Well, it was. I just watered it. So now it's only bare. I am told that I can fight global warming via my li'l green patch, but I'm not sure how an imaginary garden will do that. Must investigate.

4. I have a friends list of 54 people. What happens if one (sigh, or more) of them turns out to be, shall we say, not so friendly?* If I delete someone's e-mails from my inbox and take their name out of the address book, I'm the only one who will ever know. With Facebook I'd have to do something more public, like post that "Leta and [annoying twerp] have ended their relationship" or "Leta and [disappointment] are no longer friends" lest I continue to see their** picture constantly popping in my "friends" section, all hypocritically.

5. If someone writes on my wall and I don't write back am I rude? I actually rather like writing on people's walls, so that occurance rate will probably pick up.

Leta is ..... learning about Facebook.


*Not that this has happened, per se. But it is one of the questions that has occurred to me while going over the tatty little one-page, mimeographed page that passes for a Facebook owner's manual.***

**On Facebook everyone is plural and non-sex-specific. Every time I update it says something like "Leta updated their favorite quotes."

***i.e., Wikipedia's Facebook entry