All A-Twitter About Being Linked In to Facebook

Let just lay it on the line. I don’t really understand Twitter, I think Linked In is a fine professional networking tool, but I ♥ Facebook. The Friends. The posts. The quizzes. The birthday reminders. The ongoing Scrabble game I play with my husband. I love it all.

It began innocently enough. I accepted my husband’s invitation to join Facebook to “keep in touch” with my son, who had recently graduated college and was living in a different town while looking for a job. Despite the fact that he was practically an adult, I was still keenly interested in knowing that my son was a) alive and b) okay. Seeing the status that he posted at 3:30 a.m. could help me to do that without having to call him every day.

Strangely, my son didn’t initially see the inherent value of having his mother as a Facebook friend. When I saw my best-friend-and-roommate from college on his Friend list, it was time for some tough love. I just explained to him that if he accepted “Aunt Barb” as his Friend, he had damn well better accept me as his Friend. He grudgingly agreed, but warned me that he was not censoring himself, and that I would just have to accept what I saw on his Facebook page. It was a tough negotiation, but we’ve been Friends ever since.

Facebook’s most endearing feature is that it is a most wonderful way to keep in touch with people. You don’t have to be close friends with someone to befriend them on Facebook. Anyone can be your Facebook Friend. Passing acquaintances, people you knew once, current or former colleagues or classmates, anyone you were ever in a show with. My family members on Facebook include members of my biological family, my husband’s family, and my ex-husband’s family. I have a Friend who I met once or twice at auditions, and even a few Friends that I never met, whom I accepted before I realized you don't have to accept people if you really don't know them. If you have a name that is even a little common, people may think that you are someone else. My news feed will keep me updated on everything my Friends are doing, at least as much as they choose to share with Facebook. Want to share those vacation photos? Post them on Facebook.

Facebook can help you find and reconnect with people you think you have lost forever. I had lost contact with my one of my dearest friends from high school many years ago. On a whim one day, I did a search in Facebook, and there she was. I sent her a message, and we got together for a two-hour “catch-up” breakfast, and we are back in touch after 23 years. Recently, I contacted a “long-lost” cousin who I last saw 7 years ago at my mother’s funeral. This cousin and her siblings were the children of my mother’s brother, and we were close when we were kids – they were my friends in addition to being my cousins- but we lost touch as adults. When we talked, we exchanged e-mails and discovered we were both on Facebook. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to be back in touch with my friend and my cousins.

Facebook teaches you new things about people you thought you knew well, and not just through those “How well do you know me” quizzes. My sister, whom I’ve literally known forever, recently joined Facebook, which was a surprise in and of itself. However, you can’t even begin to imagine my astonishment when I discovered that she liked to chat through the live chat feature. I never would have guessed.

But the joys of Facebook are not all so deep and meaningful. There are also quizzes and fun games. I have always been a sucker for quizzes, from my days of reading “Cosmopolitan.” From trivia games (How Well Do You Know “The Gilmore Girls?”) to self awareness (What Color Crayon are You?) it doesn’t matter to me. I’ll take almost any quiz, play almost any game. My husband and have an ongoing Scrabble game going through Facebook. We’re very competitive – sure, he wins two of every three games, but we both TRY to win every game.

Groups and fan pages can also be useful and interesting. Facebook will prompt you to invite people to join the group you are joining. Some people indiscriminately send these invitations to their entire Facebook Friend List. I have received many an invitation for groups with names like “Six Degrees of Jewish Separation” and “Gay Men on Facebook Unite!” Now, it is entirely understandable that someone might forget that I’m not actually Jewish. My husband is Jewish,
we belong to a progressive synagogue, and I occasionally use colorful Yiddish words in everyday conversation. However, it is harder to imagine- and you will just have to trust me on this- that anyone would mistake me for a gay man.

My son still occasionally laments the invasion of the “old folks” into Facebook, once the bastion of college kids and teenagers. Well, kids, get used to it. Like immigrants to great places throughout history, we came, we liked what we saw, we conquered, and I am afraid that we are here to stay.

Resurrecting Rip

I had this crazy idea. After working on the campus newspaper as a part of a Journalism III course in graduate school, I decided that I would like to write a weekly column in the paper for the fall semester. It would be my last semester in the graduate program at California University of Pennsylvania, and I had lots to say.

My professor liked the idea, but suggested that we set it up as Independent Study Article Writing class. Not only would I write my column, I would earn college credit for doing so. This seemed too good to be true. I jumped at the chance before he had time to think it over and change his mind.

I was a non-traditional student who had returned to school after a few years, and the experience had been liberating and awakening for me. You know, a little like Rip Van Winkle waking up after all those years? So ‘Rip Wakes Up” was born. Boy, did Rip wake up! For 12 glorious, blissful weeks, I wrote my column. I wrote about the graduate program in which I was enrolled, what it was like to be a non-traditional student on campus, and pretty much anything else that was on my mind. And the response? Well, people may not have always liked me, but they responded to me, they REALLY responded to me.

My most controversiaI column, strangely enough, was “Library Madness” which was meant to be a loving tribute to libraries. So maybe I complained about the student periodical clerks in the campus library who were either unhelpful or totally incompetent. Well, I wasn’t lying or anything, and I never said they were ALL incompetent. Nonetheless, the periodical clerks were pretty upset. There was some talk of sending hate mail to my home, but no one would give them my address. If they had only put that sort of energy into assisting me in the library, I wouldn’t have written about them in my column in the first place.

After graduating, I continued to do some freelance writing on assignment and even some write personal essays, a couple of which were published and three of which were recognized in national competitions. However, I never again had a column of my own. Once in a job interview, the interviewer asked, “If you could do absolutely anything , anything at all, what would you be?” Without even thinking about it, I heard myself say, “I’d be a nationally syndicated humor columnist.”

More than a few years have passed, and that national syndicate hasn’t come calling yet. However, I have recently entered the brave new world of social networking. In a Facebook quiz when I challenged my Friends to reveal how well they knew me, one of the questions addressed my dream job. After taking the quiz, my husband suggested that I write a blog.

What would a blog be but my very own on-line column over which I could have total controI? If I learned anything over the years, it was that it was never too late to do, well, anything you want to do. It didn’t take me very long (maybe 15 seconds) to decide that I would start my very own blog. It was time to resurrect Rip.

The second coming of Rip needed a name. As I reminisced fondly about that semester of my column at Cal U, I remembered the take-off of my column my friend Jeff wrote for the parody edition of the newspaper entitled “Rip Aches All Over.” Hey, that was it! The name of my blog! The parody had become reality. After all, I was older and more tired than in my Cal U days. If the truth be told, I was already aching a little when Rip woke up the first t ime.

So, I hope you enjoy the column, I mean, blog. I’d love to hear your responses and thoughts about what I’ve written. Just don’t send hate mail to the house.