The Trouble With Social Networking

In these days of Facebook and MySpace, it's hard to get excited for a high school reunion.

Last night, I logged on to Facebook and found that I'd been invited to join a group for my high school graduating class. We're coming up on our ten year reunion (?!) and one of my super-organized classmates wants to get a head start on gathering information and planning the event.

The whole fun of a high school reunion is "catching up," which is a euphemism for "finding out who got fat." But when I check the group page for my reunion, there are the slightly aged faces of the people with whom I spent my hate-filled adolescence. If they don't have private profiles, I can read all about where they're working and what their kids look like. What's the point of losing five pounds and hiring a male escort finding a date now?

Don't get me wrong—I'm still going. It just would have been more fun to show up skinnier and less miserable without people already knowing that's what's happened to me in the past decade.