Facebook friends!

Just threw Molly’s ball and watched her chase it and bring it back for me to throw it again…and again!

Or…Dadgum, what is that smell? Molly must have…oops, forgot that was me. Need to get some air working in here!

If I was the type to update my Facebook status, those would have been my latest status updates.

Pretty exciting stuff, eh?

As you probably didn't know...or care, I use Facebook mainly for LeFlore County Journal stuff and rarely look at my personal page.

But I dropped by and noticed my friend list has grown to 517. At first, this brought incredible feelings of joy. Happiness, I say! I had 517 friends! Wow. I felt like Sally Fields accepting an Oscar.

Then I actually wasted time thinking about it and realized while I probably know and can name 517 people on a good day, I don’t think I actually have that many friends.

After browsing through the list, I soon figured out my Facebook friends could be broken into the following categories: 1. People who are actually friends; 2. People I know; 3. People I vaguely remember; 4. People I know but wish I didn’t (just kidding!); and 5. Who the #@%$ are these people.

Many of the people in the final category probably are friends of a friend, or requested to be friends for some reason that would probably confuse the heck out of sociologists or FBI profilers.

I wondered if these people requested my friendship out of some hope we would grow to be buddies and spend many fun-filled hours bonding over their latest updates on where they ate supper or discussing the latest Dancing With The Stars Many of Us have never heard of!

Maybe having a bunch of friends on Facebook brings up a person’s self esteem. Or perhaps, they like to brag that “I have more Facebook friends than you do!” or “I have never really been that popular until I got on Facebook and because of constantly asking people I don’t know to be friends, now I have nine zillion trillion friends!”

Do the others care? Is there some kind of prize for having the most friends?

My version of a true friend is somebody you can count on for help if you need it, not somebody who requested to be a friend when you don’t even know them on a social networking site.

Perhaps I should start requesting all my friends on Facebook do something to prove their friendship, such as mowing my yard when it gets hot or wash the Genemobile, since it is currently filthy.

Or to really test their friendship, I should make silly remarks to their status updates or pictures and see if they unfriend me.

But I’ll pass.