Facebook is a great way to self-promote.
My editor told all of us to post our stories online. So I do. I put links to all of my columns up on my Facebook page. Sometimes it makes me feel like an attention-seeker, a shmuck. But so be it.
The real reason I love Facebook, though, is because it helps me feel better about myself. People post some crazy stuff, and sometimes when I’m feeling down, it’s nice to see that others are worse off than me.
I can look on Facebook, for instance, and find out that the first girl I ever kissed now has a 10-month-old baby, has dropped out of school and recently married a guy (not the baby’s father) who she had started dating no more than five or six weeks ago.
I can see some awkward kid comment on a bunch of pictures of a girl three years younger than him, one of the comments saying: “Damn gurl where you been hidin at lol srsly thou your really prety.”
Or I can track one girl’s daily drama: multiple updates a day about how guys are so immature and she’s just going to “forget about him cuz hes not worth the amount of work it takes to think.” And then later on: “If only you new how little I think bout you.” And later still: “From now on I only care bout me and my true friends and you can go die.”
I read all that stuff.
What makes me uncomfortable, though, are the obituaries, the remembrances of the dead. It’s strange, but when a person dies, his/her Facebook page remains. And immediately following their deaths, their pages light up with comments: how much we all miss them, how we’ll be praying for them, etc.
I never understood that.
It makes for a good public forum in someone’s honor, but it’s still uncomfortable. Especially when you immediately look at their page on the day they died.
Stupid, everyday comments — about how drunk they got the night before, or how bad the movie Transformers 2 was, or how “we totally need to hang out soon!!!” — are suddenly followed by some seriously depressing stuff.
But for the dead on Facebook, their personal timelines have ended. They’re stuck forever in the past, unable to comment or to “like” anything new, staring back at us from old profile pictures that will never go yellow with age.
Maybe it’s better to just delete them — their pages — and get on with it.
Someone very close to me died a while back, and this person’s Facebook page is still up and running.
A few weeks ago, I was awake late at night, and — miraculously, terrifyingly — I got a message from this person, dead now for over two years.
The message said: “Hey Evan.”
It was like my screen lit on fire. I couldn’t move.
Then another message: “You won’t believe what I’m about to tell you…”
There are moments in my life when, for whatever reason, I am entirely open to anything. This could actually be happening, I thought. This person could be there, somehow. Yes, because someone is typing on the other side, trying to reach me, trying to tell me something.
I waited. My body went cold. Tell me, I thought. Please tell me. I miss you. Tell me. Tell me. Please…
Then a third and final message popped up, and the message said: “I actually got a free iPad to test out and keep! They are only giving away a limited supply, so I’m showing you this!! I absolutely LOVE the iPad :)”
I closed out of Facebook. I turned off my computer and went to bed.
Evan Smith is a freshman studying journalism and a columnist for The Post. Email him at es394910@ohiou.edu.
