The tragedy and the Irony* : Facebook sucks.

Caye Caulker,

My mum doesn’t facebook. She’s one friend I don’t need to add. She can read my blog to find out what I’m up to since I now don’t really do much email. That’s fine, facebook is personal.

Yesterday three girls from England arrive in the afternoon. I told them I was Swedish to appear more interesting and to see if they really believed me. They still haven’t got it,who wants to be British on a island full of Poms. Different is good. We hang out, chat, go for some drinks that night. Great girls.

Caroline and Krishna

Next day we hang out and chat some more. My mate frog and I persuade Caroline to come down to the Karaoke for a beer and we start chatting about the hostel which turns to talk of how some hostels are brothels on occasion, like in Africa…

This isn’t going where you think :p

Well I say to Caroline about how she could never do that but it turns out she did. She was in Ghana and did a 3 months overland trip too. We chat about Ghana and the music and dancing. The usual fun of reminding each other of the great times in a shared experience of a place. I tell her that I saw the Eclipse in ’06 thinking this would impress her even more. Hey, I’m not shallow, it was a great thing to see! :p

She impresses me by telling me that she also saw it and we chat about where she spent her 3 months. I ask if she was a volunteer and when she says ‘yes’ a trail of lightbulbs went off in my head.

On my last day I went to a volunteer party… did you got to a party a few weeks after the eclipse? – Yes

I describe it perfectly for her. The court yard, the beer place, the music, the dancing. We also went off to a club together after the party.

So weird.

It turns out she also went to the same place on St Patricks Day in Accra a couple of weeks before, the Irish pub with the live band. We made a pile of shoes and danced on the concrete until they felt like velvet slippers when we were done. Such an awesome night.

It is a small world but I wouldn’t want to paint it.

So why does facebook suck?

Because now you meet people, you make them your friend and maybe someday you notice they’re in the same country and you can track them down. We’re all becoming ultra connected, how can we manage all those narrow threads of brief connections manageable. GPS and mobiles will making ‘pinging’ your friends a normal thing. Its cool to think you will know who will be in the pub that night without asking them but then so will the police if we continue towards this dangerous path along the shattered road of civil liberties.

The chances of people meeting again, randomly reconnecting across the continents is a spectacular luxury we have  in the west, but one that is doomed to die. I met a girl called Rachel in New Zealand, Australia and Indonesia, the second and third time only briefly, but in the middle of nowhere. It was such fun. Maybe a well trodden route and not entirely unexpected but Ghana to Belize after 25 months is so amazing.

So guard your friend requests. Don’t make it a quest to gather up as many as you can. More that a few hundred are not your friends, they’re just names, more than a thousand is a full fledged hobby.  How you people make time to make new friends I never know. I guess I should try being an attractive girl to find out.

Defriend a few people right now and see if you miss them… they wont mind, they wont even notice you’re gone. Then maybe you’ll bump into a old friend you stupidly failed to make the first time.

So where is the tragedy? That I had to wait so long to really meet Caroline. She’s great. Rest assured I have not fallen in love with her over a weird coincidence, indeed she was  freaked out by the whole thing. Maybe she thought I was stalking her across the world :p We passed and didn’t connect.

The tragedy was that I didn’t make any impression on her the first time. Although she lost her photos she doesn’t appear in any of mine from the two nights in Accra. I hung back a bit, I chatted to some people but I wasn’t really there until I started dancing. As you get older you have less to lose and more to gain from being outrageous. We all want to be remembered, if only temporarily, because one day that’s all we will be.

So I will make it my goal now on to find as many people as I can to charm, encourage, humour, help and impress. I’m trying but I need to try harder. I need to be more aggressive than I am, less watching from the wings when I should be pushing towards the center of the stage. You should try the same. Who wants to be forgettable?

I believe we’re like a half marble bouncing around in a marble bag. You may never meet other half but you never will unless you try to connect with every marble in the bag. Just don’t add them all to facebook, it crashes if you have more than a million friends.

So I guess its really not facebook that sucks but me. I shan’t cancel my account just yet.

You’d impress me right now by subscribing and telling 3 more people to subscribe, my blog is now my sole income. I’m trying to travel overland to every country remember, its not free.

*If you want to add me in facebook I’m Travel Trousers, put something original on my wall. Mum, don’t even try!

Comments are back on.

Tags: st patricks day, mail, photo, eve, girls, ghana, drinks, concrete, gps, crash