Yes, I love technology, but not as much as you, you see. Always and forever.

I try to embrace technological evolution as much as possible. My biggest reason is that I don't want to be like that moron that said in 1900 that we have everything we could possibly want or need as human beings. Hey buddy, just because your Model T had an iPod dock and you had an app for moveable type does not mean that you could put limits on the rest of humanity. You may have been happy with waiting eighteen hours for a baked potato to cook, but that does not make it right.

I regard technology in much the way that I do any other seemingly useful thing to which I am introduced- it can be used as a tool or a weapon depending on how you hold it (Thanks for the wisdom, Ms. Ani.). Those that know me may be surprised to find that I am actually a bit of a Pollyanna of the virtual world, and I very often look at the positive side of what technology has brought humanity. Soldiers stationed overseas can now speak with and see their wives and children without having to endure the slogging wait for mail; small businesses and entrepeneurs can take off and thrive thanks to online business practices that are easily maintained and relatively inexpensive; and most importantly, I can call upon a Google reference immediately to substantiate how right I am when in argument with a friend- provided that someone in the vicinity has a Smartphone.

As an observer of human awfulness, I also enjoy technological evolution and the fun it presents in letting me watch people romanticize/bitch about all that it has taken away. If I have to read another poem about how much 30 year-old hipsters miss making mixtapes, I will cut up bits of roast beef and toss it in the TVP bin at my local grocery co-op. We get it- mixtapes were awesome, and making a playlist on iTunes will never rate as highly on the spectrum of what constitutes love's truest use of an hour and a half. To these complaints though, I offer this- tape players are still around- even ones that record from CDs and records. Go ahead and spend that time making a mixtape for the person you love. I guarantee you that within ten minutes, your patience will have reached its breaking point for what is truly a figurative gesture (I personally have been tape deck free since 2003) and you will run screaming back to your MacBook Pro so that you can celebrate your right to multi-task by dragging and dropping your declarations of forever between rounds of "Plants vs. Zombies".

So, being one who generally embraces the changes of life that technology has brought, my only real complaint of the technological age is this- the rules of social networking force the continuance of transitory relationships WAY past what was previously expected of me and have thus stunk up the refrigerator that is my life so bad that no amount of Arm & Hammer can dissipate the funk.

A bit of history for ya'all in the cheap seats:

Four years ago, on a rainy day, I sat on the couch with a male friend and put together a profile for that new website everyone in our social circle was using. Can't remember the website name but it had to do with facing something, I think. I admit, this was mostly in the interest of sitting close to said male friend and possibly making a move as at that point, I was very much a MySpace devotee and did not see any reason to switch. Wait, I take that back-I was pretty excited that the simple user formatting made it so that I did not have to see Jessica Alba's crotch every time that I clicked on the profile page of a male friend. Thank you Mark Zuckerberg for maintaining creative control over user interface. HTML code in the hands of the minions is never a good thing. Also thank you for giving me a reason to see Jesse Eisenberg more in 2010, as he currently tops my list of weirdly hot Jewish boys I would totally tap. But I digress . . .

Much like my relationships with people, I went through my initial Facebook honeymoon period. It did no wrong- it made keeping up with people instant and easy, it only took 5 minutes to upload an album of pictures, informed me of the relationship status changes of my hoped-for paramours, and allowed me to be altogether hilarious for my variously located peeps on a daily basis. Insert image of me in a flowy white dress and the Facebook "F" logo running toward one another in a daisy-covered field while "Love is a Many Splendored Thing" plays in the background.

Unfortunately though, like all relationships that do not phase out in a highly publicized and soon-to-be-romanticized-by-Baz-Luhrman murder-suicide, there came the time when Facebook and I hit our sophomore slump. Problems arose.

Problem #1: Becoming Facebook friends with people from my past.

Within a year of that afternoon on the couch with the boy that was not-to-be (sadly, he sat to my left- like George Costanza I can only seduce to my right), everyone in the known universe had a Facebook. With a disgusting amount of ease, I could easily find out who from my past had gotten hitched, come out, gone bald, popped out six kids, had a sex change, and/or was working as a senator. For someone with a gruesome fascination with looking at the bottom of the shoe after it has squished a particularly squelchy bug, this was a dream come true.

I came to learn however, that "friending" people from my past had an unfortunate side effect. Once the novelty of encountering these long-forgotten connections had worn away, I was stuck with having these people as witnesses to the everyday aspects of my personal life. What started as the online equivalent of a surprise encounter in the grocery store quickly evolved into the social parallel of having to watch "Inception" with someone that was 40 minutes late to the movie. Yes, party-girl-from-college-that-has-since-become-hardcore-Baptist, sometimes the streets in my life bend up, and no, I do not want to take the time to explain to you why.

Enter de-friending. Already familiar with the concept from previously played out drama with friends over MySpace, it did not take me long to realize that the only way to combat prolonged and sustained social awkwardness with those with whom I only share a common prior zip code was to purge those friends that I had not actual spoken to recently. Yes Facebook, I thank you for providing me with a way to get a get in contact Chip, the former hippy, now glach-toting survivalist, but since I do not require the bylaws to the NRA at this very moment, I am going to cut my losses and click the black X next to his face.

Some Facebook friends will not go easily into the night however, which leads me to-

Problem 2: Why do you force me to repeatedly reject you?

Coming from a history of online journaling, my Facebook status updates have tended toward what one could call "plentiful". At its zenith, I was probably updating my status 5-6 times a day, which coincidentally intercepted with my decision to de-friend my initial round of friends once adored- then remembered fondly- then awkwardly back-in-touch with and offering opinions on my ruminations as to whether or not to become a pescatarian . Sadly, my status updates going from prolific to nonexistent caught the notice of more than a few former Facebook friends, and I received several requests to "re-friend".

One has to wonder what goes through the brain of someone that has been de-friended and then requests a second shot. Do they think it was done by mistake? If so, why would they not have received a message from me saying, "Oh, I am so sorry! I was scanning through my friends list and accidentally unfriended you! Let's re-friend immediately!" Or do they think that I deleted them because I thought that they did not care about my life? In that case, a "re-friending" request must be intended to indicate to me that I am important to them and that not having my pictures, work information, and sexual preference available to them in one-stop shopping format has some sort of bearing on their everyday life. Regardless of their reasoning, I chose to "Ignore" all of those with whom I had separated contact. I made no mistakes- it was not done out of spite, I just did not need to stay in touch in order to think well of them.

Following this, I quickly found that the only thing worse than the feeling that you get from refusing the Facebook friendship of people who have socially died by your point-and-click arrow is having the refuse them twice. AND THREE TIMES. How do you explain to someone the truthfulness of relationships coming to an end? You can say: "Look- I am so happy that I knew you, but in order for me to continue to look upon our shared memories with fondness, I need to be allowed to wax nostalgic, and the only way that I can do that is to let the past stay in the past." People do not get that, though. What they hear is: "I'm sorry, but I hate you, I have always hated you, and on top of that your shirt was totally tucked into your underwear the entire time I knew you and I am too much of a bitch to tell you." Sigh.

This leads to the final problem I encounter with Facebook-

Problem 3: De-friending those I still see but with whom I do not frequently interact.

Okay, I will admit- I like to keep my friends list small. By this, I mean small in terms of Facebook. Using relative values, I should state that if I had a party and 79 people showed up at my tiny apartment, I could not in any way characterize my company or my capacity problem as "small", but in the world of social networking, the descriptor is apt. As a result, I sometimes go through my list and think to myself- "So-and-so- have I talked to them in a while? Have they posted anything interesting lately? Nope. Okay- they're out." It is really that simple. I will admit, just like everyone, I have been guilty of the emotion-based de-friending, but I would say that 97% of the time, people in my life get the virtual ax simply because we have not connected recently. My friends have a saying for the newbies, "Yeah, you are not really part of the circle until Laurie has de-friended you on Facebook." It is often told with a grin, a laugh, and an eye-roll. That reaction is my badge of honor, it is.

When I was a kid, my mother was a college student and had a button on her backpack that said "Subvert the Dominant Paradigm" which at the time I did not understand, but have since come to realize meant "F--- the System." I do love what technology has brought me, on both a societal and personal level, but I refuse to buy into the idea that I have to follow assinine cultural rules of behavior in a realm that does not exist in order to take part in that which I love. My decision not to adhere to these rules of behavior does not make me a bad person and does not mean that I love the people that have drifted out of the foreground of my life any less. I can be your friend as a noun without having to verb it to you too. (I feel like there is a "That's what she said" joke in there somewhere . . .)

Update: Since posting this entry I have been deleted as a Facebook friend by everyone I know. I count it toward people getting technologically naked and starting the revolution.

P.S. to the update: No they didn't. Train wrecks like me will always be popular.

Put down the microphone and step away from the Tolstoy . . .

I don't usually like to write about my singleness on any level because it was done to death in the 90's/00's, and in much more scandalous detail by a fictional female character far better-dressed than myself, and whose voice was penned almost entirely by a team of gay male writers. Please understand- I am not knocking this. I wish I had my own (body of a) greek (god) chorus to move me even from point A to point across-the-street-from-A with the walk of Cleopatra and the wit of Mae West. It would also be nice if I rolled out of bed looking gorgeous and somehow managed to learn a lesson each week with me and my best girlfriends all while actually, you know, getting some . . . but I digress.

What I do enjoy writing about however, are all the fun little changes that are taking place as I move from my 20's to my 30's. Where once I could stay up until it was time to change clothes and go to class and still be lucid enough to take notes and figuratively kick a frat guy in the balls during open discussion; I now complain if my friends keep me out past 9:45 pm because my boss looks down on when he finds me asleep on my keyboard the next day with 5,000 pages of "d"s and plus signs in place of what should be my board report. The body that once lived on Totino's Party Pizza's (because they were a whole meal for 99 cents) and managed to stay within the same 10 lb. span for the whole four years of college has metamorphosed into something that swells like a blowfish if I even look at a Cadbury Cream Egg the wrong way. The financial aid fairy that used to bring me a check every three months in 2001, has, within a span of 10 years, become the grim reaper known as Sallie Mae who stalks me no matter where I move, demanding my pound of flesh, commanding no less than all of the horror of a music video narrated by Vincent Price.

I cannot cash out my retirement when I leave a job now because I KNOW I AM GOING TO EVENTUALLY NEED IT. I worry about whether I am getting enough Vitamin D. It would be patently ridiculous for me to wear a t-shirt that had any of my spunkier attributes written across my chest in glitter and utterly horrifying to have it emblazoned across the backside of my sweatpants. I no longer believe that I am going to change the world by having profound conversations with friends at any sort of Open Mic night, no matter how late it gets. Things are DIFFERENT now. I'm different.

My expectations for dating are different too. From the time that I was 14 to about 22, I fully expected that the man with whom I would crash into lust/love would be exactly like Chris Stevens, AKA "Chris in the Morning" from "Northern Exposure". That's right, my ideal man was 6'6", understood astrophysics on a level that rivaled Hawking, drove a Harley, lost his voice from witnessing my beauty, would read me Yeats as I fell asleep, wake me up with the soft lull of a bootleg vinyl Kinks album, would build me a catapult to fling my problems away, and top everything off with mind-blowing sex that women would apparently travel hundreds of miles to experience, given the right cycle of the moon.

Of course, I did not think that I would ACTUALLY marry Chris Stevens. He was a fictional character, and by the time that I was old enough to actually have any of my adolescent fantasies turn reality, John Corbett was looking long in the tooth and his turn in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" proved that he had absolutely nothing left to contribute to my sexual development. (In defense of Mr. Corbett as an actor, I will say that he is fabulous on "The United States of Tara".) I just thought it was completely reasonable that, given the person that I was, and what I had to offer (long hair, big boobs, and a big brain), it was not unreasonable to expect my very Oregonian version of a white knight. Without my knowledge though, my ideal was more or less the romantic equivalent of perceiving astronautics as a sound career choice- it actually happens only for a very few, and usually not without first being put through a lot of puking.

I grew though. I dated and not-dated guys that possessed various aspects of "Chris in the Morning". One revolutionary. One artist. One intellect. One with a super silky voice. One who had to stoop to enter older buildings. I flirted with the idea of going for a guy with a motorcycle but decided not to on the off-chance of it working out and becoming that larger woman that wears a leather jacket with fringe on it and terrifies small children when I walk into Mom and Pop diners.

From all these wonderful, hilarious, crazy, intelligent, messed-up men, I learned a truth that I should have learned from the parts of that show that featured Dr. Fleischman- men are riddled with insecurity, baggage, and idiosyncracies the same way that women are, and it seems worse because a lot of them seem to also lack a filter. If we are truly lucky though, the guy that we are with works to overcome those things so that (even it is just for a couple of minutes a day) he can show you that you matter to him through being selfless or profound or protective to you, and that is what helps you to fall for him. (I also learned that if it IS only for a few minutes a day, it does not last long.) If I got exactly what I wanted in exactly the way I want it, there would be no room to surprise me with a sudden burst of compassion, sweetness, or humanity, because it would all just come across as standard works. Portrayals of love do not deserve to turn into Salisbury steak.

I am not going to lie- remnants of Chris in the Morning will always maintain a dormant hold on my psyche that will unexpected manifest itself in the sudden urge to offensive tackle men with longish hair wearing a blue bandana, work boots, and a hawaiian shirt. Getting older though, has helped me to understand that much like the aforementioned Ms. Bradshaw, his off-the-cuff thoughts were also formulated with the help of a writing team- this one featuring art history and Russian literature majors that were just tickled pink to have post-collegiate work in the public sector- causing him to come to his own poignant conclusions at the end of each week.

. . . That said, what's The King of Queens' excuse?

Good night, Cicely.