breaking a few eggs

This past week, after discovering that I had an alarming number of Facebook friends (1,195 to be exact, and I can't even think of 50 people I know off the top of my head much less people I'd call a friend) I decided to take a tip from Holly and do a good old-fashioned purge. Get rid of the dead weight. Trim off the excess.

I was able to get the number down to around 955, though if I had my druthers (again, what the EFF is a druther, we may never know) it would be much less than that. In the purge went people I went to high school with but never talked to then/talk to now, HOBY kids whose identities I couldn't determine upon reading their names, people I was only friends with because of whoever I was dating at the time and other randoms who've popped up along the way. For Christ's sake, I was friends with at least a dozen people that I met on New Year's Eve several years ago when I went party hopping in Murfreesboro with my friend Bekah and Allah knows I couldn't pick one of those people out of a line-up.

Mostly, I think these people will never notice I'm gone, because I feel pretty confident that if they had been the ones friend-purging, I'd be axed, too. But there was one person who was a little verclempt about the whole situation, and I received a lovely message in my Facebook inbox just a few days after the purge.

We're going to need to rewind a little bit here. Remember when I went speed dating? And I went on some dates with this one guy I met there? (Sorry I didn't fill you in on all this before, it's just awkward blogging about someone you want to buy you dinner again.)

We had a nice enough time, he bought me drinks, gave decent compliments, took me out for Mexican and had other talents that shant be mentioned here. Mostly because my dad and brothers read this, too. Sorry, Internet. Anywho. He was fine for a few laughs but it was nothing serious, and in fact I started to realize on about date three or four that when he was talking and I wasn't at least a little drunk I just wanted to hit him in the face to make him stop. We didn't really have anything in common, other than apparently being over the legal drinking age, so all of our conversations seemed to devolve into Stories About Times I Was Drunk. Which, okay, is maybe fun for half a second. With your friends. Or your family. But someone you're dating? And just sort of met like, I don't know, A WEEK AGO? It's all a little much.

So first I tried just ignoring his texts/calls/Facebook messages/smoke signals, but then my friend Mike convinced me that I was building up bad dating karma and I surely did not want to be messing around with karmic dating curses. So I ended up seeing him again. But then we had a conversation wherein he explained the sport of bullfighting to me for 20 EFFING MINUTES the entire way from his apartment to the train station, despite my first, second and THIRD polite requests to please STOP TALKING ABOUT BULLFIGHTING BEFORE I RALPH ON YOUR FLIP FLOPS. Did he stop? No, no he did not. And I felt that urge to hit him in the face creeping back up and I said to myself, I said, "Self? We are NOT doing this anymore. Capiche?"

So since then, he's texted once. Maybe twice? And of course I have not responded. Which didn't get him too upset, no -- it was the Facebook defriending that sent him over. And why? Because he wanted to still be friends.

Here's the thing. I have a few ex-boyfriends who I consider myself friends with, or at least on friendly terms. But these were people who, I don't know, I had something in common with. Spent some time in conversation with. Did not want to hit in the face. (At least not all the time.) Me and Mr. Speed Date? In case you forgot, we did meet at speed dating. We weren't friends before, we're not friends now. We were hardly friends in the middle bit.

And sure, I have "friends" on Facebook who aren't my BFFs in real life. But I keep connected with them so that I can view massive photo albums of pictures from their weddings, critique their bridesmaids' dresses and gossip about who is or is not taking to pregnancy well, IF you know what I mean. I do not, as it happens, have much interest in looking at Mr. Speed Date's photo albums of what are essentially slightly varying versions of the same photo of him chugging beers in different locations around Manhattan and taking body shots off barmaids dressed like slutty Catholic school girls.

This, it seems, has hurt his feelings. But like they say -- if you want to make an omelette, you gotta break a few eggs.

And I have literally no clue what that has to do with this situation, but it seemed deep.


cheers,
elizabeth