Weekend Update: Friends
It seems almost new and different to return, this evening, to the care and feeding of the Daily Office — the daily Daily Blague entry in which I post provocative links, ie links that inspire me to bloviate. It’s different because I’ve just discovered the world beyond blogging. I won’t be abandoning The Daily Blague anytime soon, but I won’t be feeling guilty for not writing “bloggy” entries, whatever that means. Because, as I discovered today, the fun part of the Blogosphere has moved on, to Facebook.
I did not sign up for Facebook in an idle moment. I happened to notice, on my WordPress “dashboard,” that the DB had received an incoming link from “Jahsonic.” Really! Exploring a bit, I came across this post. If you scroll down, you’ll find that the author of Jahsonic, Jan Geerinck, a gentleman in Antwerp, cites the DB as authority for the proposition that the old tale about the lady who hides her lover in a tub, launched by Apuleius and picked up by Boccaccio, provides the basis for Ravel’s highly but dryly entertaining one-act opera, L’heure espagnole. Wow!
This is why I don’t try to edit Wikipedia entries. I send them $10 a month, not my emendations. I would lose faith in Wikipedia altogether if I thought that the reference I was checking out might have been written by me. My attribution of Ravel’s plot is just the sort of armchair scholarship that I’m trying to purge from my system. Nevertheless, I stand by the assertion, at least for the time being. The important thing was to thank Mr Geerinck.
The problem was that I could do so in one of only two ways. I could post a comment, or I could contact him at Facebook. Posting a comment seemed a little vainglorious, or, what I call Tooting Bec. A Facebook contact would require me to sign up.
I’d been meaning to create a Facebook account. I’d been advised to do so — buy an adviser whom I pay! But whenever I thought of it, I saw myself as a dirty old man showing up at a middle-school sock hop. What’s he doing here? Well, that’s not what happened.
What happened was that, in the space of a day, I went from 0 to 29 friends, almost all of whom I know, but many of whom I’ve been out of touch with. A few people, I knew of. Wow! They confirmed our friendship? I do have to write to my rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery. I did not mean to ask him to be my friend. I think the world of Dr Magid, but I insist on maintaining a few shreds of our professional relationship. He is the doctor, and I am the patient. On the other hand, he does always ask what I’ve been reading. Maybe I ought to send him to Goodreads.
It’s not that I regard every one of my Facebook friends as friends. I’m not going to be asking anybody to help me paint the apartment. I take a very serious, French view of friendship: it includes one or two people outside your family plus everybody in your lycée class.
Speaking of friendship, Fossil Darling was complaining that Wells Fargo had “stolen” the Wachovia takeover from Citigroup. I told him that he has obviously been Drinking the Kool-Aid; in a year or less, I assured him, he’ll be thanking his lucky stars that Citi’s deal fell through. Then, yesterday, up at his health club in Luxury Haven, he ran into a Citi broker who “used to work with a lot of people at Wachovia.” Libel laws being what they are, I shan’t repeat what Fossil repeated, but I can tell you that the broker’s comments were highly uncomplimentary as to character and fitness. What a good thing it was, he thought, that Citi wouldn’t be trying to swallow the Charlotte bank. “That is so amazing!” replied Fossil. “My dearest friend has been telling me the same thing, and he’s not even in the business!”
“So,” I asked, “who’s your dearest friend?”
Needless to say, Fossil Darling will be the very last man to sign up at Facebook before the rule against perpetuities expires.