TheBanyanTree: 3000 Friends

[Monique Colver]

One of my "friends" on Facebook is very excited today. He just got friend
number 3001, no mean feat in these days of social isolation. Amazing, isn't
it? Friend 3001? Okay, perhaps friend may not be the correct term here.
There are friends, and then there are friends. How many of us "friends" is
he going to invite to his birthday party? All of us, I hope. I do want to
meet the friends of my friend. Where would he hold such an event? Or will he
forget all about us and instead just focus on a few people he knows in real
life?

The Internet is a wondrous thing, isn't it? If we're feeling isolated we can
just log on and look at how many friends we have. "Look!" I often exclaim,
"I have friends! People like me!" Let's forget that some of my "friends" are
people I'm friends with because they wrote a book that I liked, or I met
them once, or I maybe have never met or spoken to them at all, ever, by
email or in person. Still, they signed on as my FRIEND! They must like me!
That, or they just really want their friend count to be up. I'm certainly
not above that sort of thing.

I think a new term is in order. Perhaps iFriend. These are iFriends. Not on
this list, of course, since you all know far more about me than you should,
you're stuck with being a friend friend. But for all those people on social
networking sites, let's call it what it is. iFriends. iFriends don't get
invited to my birthday party (December 20th, should I decide to have one),
unless they're also friends. iFriends don't get frantic phone calls from me
in the middle of the night when I realize that everything I've done has been
in service to the devil and my psyche's dissolving around me in big puddles.
I save those calls for friends. iFriends don't even get Christmas cards.
iFriends can be amusing, and they can even be helpful if I have a question
that one of them may have an answer to. But they don't count for gift giving
occasions, nor do they count when I die and God asks me, "So, did you have a
lot of friends?" I'm not going to tell her, "Sure! I have 7,267 friends! You
can check my Facebook if you don't believe me!" God can see right through
that. "Aha!" She'll say, "those are IFriends! They don't count!"

Best not to antagonize God on the first day. I have many excellent friends.
I'm lucky that way. So I don't have a million iFriends. That's okay.
iFriends are cheap and plentiful. And I bet if I offered incentives I'd get
more. Prizes. Maybe I should offer potential iFriends prizes. Or iFriend
stamps. Collect them all. I'll have to give this some more thought.

Monique