The Facepocalypse
"I have a crisis," Gloria said as I walked through the front door. "My mother wants to friend me on Facebook.""It's the Facepocalypse," I said.
"I can't tell her 'no', but I don't want her seeing my Facebook posts, either," she said. "And I can't block her from seeing them, because then she would know I'm blocking her."
This really is a crisis: the crisis of awkwardness. Gloria likes Facebook. She enjoys hearing about what her friends are doing. But her friends, and the types of posts that get made on Gloria's wall, are so entirely incompatible with what her mother believes that friending her might rip the fabric of the space-time continuum.
That doesn't actually make sense, strictly speaking, but I do like how it sounds.
"Why am I so freaked out about this?" she asked.
"Because your mother wanting to see your Facebook posts is like her asking to see your underwear drawer," I said. "Your mother will be looking at your thongs."
"Agghhhh!" She emitted a sound that cannot be adequately spelled.
"Well, let's see," I said. "Option one: you could close your Facebook account. Really, if Facebook has reached the point where your mother wants to friend you, isn't that a jumping the shark moment? Facebook is dead now, right?"
"Let's just put that in the 'possibility' pile," she said.
"A disfiguring hand disease has left you unable to type?" I asked. "Downside: wearing prosthetic claws at holidays."
"Possibility," she said.
"Wait, I've got it," I said. "Just Google Facebook identity theft, and tell your mother you're very concerned that as an elderly person, she might be susceptible to having her identity stolen. Yes, that is genius!"
"I don't think that will work," she said.
"That's all I've got," I said. "I leave you to your fate."
"Wait!" She said. "I'm not finished going through my paranoid freak out yet! What if she decides I'm an unfit mother and sues for grandparent's parental rights?"
"Congratulations," I said. "You have officially reached the most unlikely scenario in the world." Gloria loves to do this. It's the apocalyptic version of Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon. She can go from a paper cut to brain cancer in less than six steps, every time.
She laughed. "Sometimes it makes me feel better just saying it out loud," she said.
"Good luck," I said. "Now, I need to go to my study and write this all up for everyone else's amusement."
"I knew that was coming," she said.
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