I have never quite understood, and I still do not, what is so alluring about Facebook.  For all the chatter and excitement when it was coming out, I assumed that it was some sort of super website, or at least that it resembled collegehumor.com or some other similar entity.  However, this was not the case.  What I found was an impossibly boring, preppy, Greek-life answer to the emo and goth ruled myspace.com.

The whole point of Facebook is to present the coolest, most attention grabbing profile on the web. Unfortunately, unlike myspace’s scads of seizure-inducing layouts and ear-splitting songs that screech through your computer speakers until you grapple with the “pause” button, all a Facebook patron has to work with is the uninspired white background with blue text.  But, since this site is beloved by people who put themselves through utter hell just to fit in, conformity is perfect!

Come to think of it, let us examine what goes into a Facebook profile.

First and foremost is the picture; this is rather important as it will represent me for the whole three seconds I will leave it up before getting bored with it and switching it out for another photo of me puking I like better.  Since it’s so important, I need to make sure that I take at least 80 possible pictures before attempting to choose which one is just right for the page. However, these criteria differ a little bit from the standards set by myspace: instead of a closely zoomed headshot (of me being moody and unique, of course) taken poorly by my own hand, a Facebook photo must involve beer, an illegal substance, a guitar, or some combination of the three. If I'm a girl, I must be making a grotesque “kissy” face at the camera that I perceive to be attractive but in reality is proving to be a rather effective method of birth control.

Once I have the profile picture out of the way, I need to upload the other 79 photos I took that didn’t make the cut and create a whole album of them so that people know exactly what to look for the next time they want to practice their boxing skills.  I also must upload at least one completely irrelevant picture and tag someone/something in it as myself. This will display how “random” I am.

Next I need to fill out our favorites under just about every category you can imagine.  If I'm not sure of what to put here because I have no personality and/or am afraid of writing down the wrong thing, I'll just start with “Donnie Darko” under movies, “Family Guy” under TV, and “Pink Floyd” under music despite not being able to name a single song other than “Wish You Were Here” and go from there. Under the quotes category, I just copy and paste something from an inane song that I feel touched me deeply and I should be covered. I don’t worry about the favorite book category, since no one will mind if I just write “i dun’t reed, lol;” if I click on the link, I will realize that there are lots of other illiterate people for me to befriend.   continue >>