September 15, 2011
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The Daily News1 Social Networking is an odd thing, isn’t it?
2 Case in point: I never in my entire life heard a human being even begin to utter, “Woot! Woot!”
3 Never once. Not even now.
4 I also vaguely remember my early Facebook days watching person upon person say, “Rawr!”
5 Personally, I still have never heard a human being even remotely utter the word “Rawr!”
6 In my daily movings about, I have yet to hear someone say, “Off to DB’s for a birthday party!”
7 Or the absolutely nerve-shattering, “Too cute!”
8 Actually, that social nightmare is beginning to hit the mainstream, right along with it’s hideous partner, “Too funny!” A bit too, too much for me.
9 When I first arrived on that playing field called Facebook, I just wanted to join the masses. It seemed as though someone had dropped me on a dark football field late at night. Quiet. Weird. In this eerie state, I quite suddenly glanced up to see the lights pop on, causing near blindness as I stared into the glaring brightness. Woot.
10 Almost immediately ghosts dropped by, people I hadn’t seen in years. They came out of the sky and said hello with massive enthusiasm, something right out of Casper.
11 For a moment I thought it was one of those things that supposedly happens to you when you die. I thought for a second that I was Bruce Willis.
12 I remember distinctly making that parallel, because there were times in the life of a Catholic boy growing up that I was TOLD that would happen when I reached Heaven. I would meet all the loved ones who had passed away, and then somehow be escorted elsewhere.
13 I remember thinking of a comment a student once made when I showed The Sixth Sense: “I see white people.” I half expected to go home and see that shivering white guy in his underpants standing in my bathroom doorway.
14 And yet there was an oddity to it all. I would get “friend” requests from, well, friends. At first I didn’t know what to do with them. I feared they would no longer BE my friend if I didn’t push the right buttons.
15 And then I saw that it was okay for me to visit their “Wall”. I wasn’t quite sure what the difference was among a wall post, a comment, or a message. Or that if I made myself available to chat, that I might get into a mini “convo” with someone.
16 The first thing I wanted to do was to bail. I’m not a “chatter”, to begin with. Never could keep up. I’m not really into having fourteen conversations with people capable of doing that. I prefer to give people my undivided attention.
17 Anyway, there was a weirdness to it all. Then some guy poked me.
13 Dude.
14 Who pitched that one at corporate?
15 I looked around for a button that said “Right Cross to the Chin” but alas, whoever initially designed all this Zuckerberg boushit didn’t have the cajones to install that one.
16 Honestly.
17 Like Facebook already wasn’t weird enough.
18 Anyway, parading a bunch of oddities about social networking and all its jingoism and strangeness is more than I could bear in the middle of the night. I just thought I’d get a few hits in.
19 It IS weird though.
20 Moving on, Part the First: So Bill Neukom’s career with the Giants walks into a bow-tied bar…
21 What’s THAT all about?
22 I liked the guy, but there’s more to that story than meets the eye. Ralph Barbieri began waxing poetic about something rotten in the state of Denmark yesterday. I had the same thoughts.
23 Ah vell. At least we got rings, and pitching. Not much else.
24 Just strange days.
25 Moving on, Part the Second: Who needs to disappear?
26 Besides me, of course.
27 Around ten years ago I started this exclusive club called the Goof-Off Club. It consisted of some of the closest people to me, family mostly, at a time when we got tired of the world taking every single minute of our lives away. So I would post a topic online each day, through email, which I STILL swear by.
28 It might be, “Ugliest cars of all time.”
29 Or “Worst hair do’s.”
30 Or my personal fave, “Who got issues?”
31 There were like around ten or twelve of us, and the rules were that there were no rules. You had to reply-to-all with ten answers.
32 It became fun, because as the day rolled along, we would periodically check our emails. I had a notebook, so that after my students would settle into classwork, I could construct some fun answers.
33 The answers of course, were hilarious. For “Who got issues?” for instance, we would get things like, “Ru-Paul.” “Hitler.” “Our next-door neighbors–both sides.” “Povich.” etc. You get the drift.
34 As the day would roll along, you would periodically pull yourself away from whatever idiocy the world was demanding you do, and check out the lists. They would come in slowly, often a person at a time. Each person’s job was to get laughs from everyone else. And part of the deal was you couldn’t do it during your break. If you worked, you were to do it RUTBN (Right Under the Boss’s Nose).
35 This was TRUE social networking, not this new stuff. And it was done with extremely funny people, and wonderful people. Our first year became epic. Somewhere I have a boxload of GOC files, but the recent cleansing of the garage placed them somewhere hidden.
36 Or perhaps in the dumps. Who knows?
37 Anyway, right in the midst of all this folderol last night, I thought, “Who needs to disappear?” I’m quite certain it was one of our original goofs. I’d begin with Donald Trump, followed by Cheney, and by any commercial actors dressed as fruit or planets.
38 You can see it can become fun, and quite frivolous. I’d jot a few ideas down, teach, pull up emails, and inevitably another goof would come down the pike. I usually tried to launch mine early, but it was great fun, and everyone’s work days shortened considerably, as did our stress.
39 You’d come home, take off your shoes, sip some lemonade, play some jazz, and have around a half-hour of hearty laughs re-visiting the daily goofs.
40 It never caught on when I tried it once on Facebook. Too many people worried about checking in at cool places, or “just finished cutting my toenails”.
41 Which is okay. I’m glad to see you are checked in at Payless Shoes. I’m down. I got sole. : P <——sideways guy with tongue out.
42 Meanwhile, I am curious.
43 Who needs to disappear?
44 I can think of a few.
45 Meanwhile, this DN was exactly 1092 words.
46 Well.
47 Then my work here is done.
48 Have a delightful day.50 Who needs to disappear?
51 Think about it. Name ten. Number each down the page. Just for your own sanity.
52 See ya agin.
53 Peace.~H~
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