Anathema Hindenburg, or, Why Sophia Hates Facebook

Many, many blog post ideas have flitted through Sophia's sieve-like Over Fifty brain during the last month, but none of them stayed around long enough to turn into a bonafide post. This one was begun a few weeks ago, and finally finished today.  Clearly this is a harbinger of unfinished projects to come.  Well, onward.

Sophia, unlike most people, does not have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. She unequivocally hates it, and would love to deactivate her account permanently.  She actually did do that last winter, but her husband Thor more or less forced (nagged) her into returning.  You see, Thor and Sophia have a web design/marketing firm. Part of this business is something called Social Media Marketing, the Next Big Thing in advertising.  Thor has hired a Younger Hipper Person to manage this aspect of the business, but Sophia has to stay on Fakebook--oops, she means Facebook--to monitor this YHP's efforts.

There are many reasons for Sophia to hate Facebook. First, she has very few friends (see earlier post). According to various journalistic sources, the average number of FB friends is about 120. Sophia has 40, and has apparently reached critical mass, for she can't think of a single other person to Friend.  Here's how they break down:

husband: 1
first cousins:  9
second cousins: 2
person married to second cousin: 1
person married to first cousin: 1
graduate school acquaintances:  3
aunts: 1
high school ex-friends:  3
ex-boyfriends: 1
local park:  1
former professional colleagues: 2
mom: 1
brothers:  2
brother's girlfriend/partner: 1
people from her town, one of whom actively dislikes her:  5
stranger who friended her after she left a comment on a Golden Retriever Foundation post: 1
fellow mom/friend who lives Back East: 1
fellow blogger:  1
Percival's former English nanny: 1
imaginary person invented to test online re-invention possibilities: 1
cousin's (now deceased) cat: 1

Sophia is pretty sure one's hoard of Fake(book) Friends is inversely proportional to one's age. People in their twenties have thousands. People in their thirties and forties have hundreds. People in their fifties (usually) have around a hundred. People in their sixties and seventies have only a few dozen. In short, Sophia has the Friend List of a much older woman.  Especially if you remove the names of imaginary, non-human, and deceased "friends."

When she first joined FB, it was kind of exciting. Owing to Severe Dysfunction in her father's birth family, she missed out knowing her many first cousins, who live on the West Coast and are mostly female. So this opened up a whole new world of girlfriend possibilities. However, it soon became apparent that, relative to these cool California Girls, Sophia is a weird intellectual nerd--not a fun, Sex-in-the-City type with a lot of stylish shoes and, well, friends. Over time, her posts and pictures garnered fewer and fewer effusive comments, or comments of any kind. As a result, she posted less and less, finally limiting herself to newspaper articles she found interesting, and status updates on celestial happenings, such as meteor showers.

No one else shared her interest in either intra-galactic doings or the Quirky News of the World, however. Not even her cousin's (now dead) cat. So she quit posting those, too, and resigned herself to being a Facebook Wallflower. A complete and utter Social Network Failure.

Do not weep for Sophia. She considers this Facebook Fail to be a mark of honor. Perhaps this is sour grapes, but if so, she remains in denial about it. She doesn't wish she had been Homecoming Queen, or Head Cheerleader, or Class President. And she seriously doubts that having 1,239 "friends," like one of her younger cousins, would make her a happier or more emotionally balanced person.

But okay, it would maybe be fun to find out. Well, never mind. Not gonna happen. 

In any case, she sees no point in posting status updates about what she made for dinner last night, or how much she hates Lady Gaga/Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck/Lindsay Lohan, or how cool her life is. Her life is pretty cool, but since most of the people on her Friend List are childless, she suspects that cute pix of Percival and Zeus (the dog) seem like bourgeois bragging. Likewise pictures of her hunky 10-years-younger hubby. And since she can't afford to take fancy vacations at the moment, all photos tend to have a backyard backdrop, which makes her look like a provincial plebe.

For the record, Sophia has traveled quite enough, thank you. Once she takes Percival to Europe, she's done with passports. Unless there's a military coup or something, she will live out her remaining days in her native land, where all the signs, jokes, and insults are familiar and comprehensible.

Facebook Undead

Anyway, just as Sophia had resigned herself to using this obnoxious site only for business, something happened. Anathema Hindenberg returned to haunt her. Anathema Hindenburg was once Lorraine Hindenburg, a former professional colleague of Sophia's in her now-defunct life as an academic. Lorraine was, in Sophia's field, a rara avis--a hot-looking professor with tenure.  Sophia admired her, not for her leather miniskirts or toned arms--okay, maybe the latter, a bit--but for her brilliance.  For a time, Lorraine was everything Sophia wanted to be--smart, stylish, and a fabulous writer of Arcane Academic Drivel.

Lorraine had been born with absolutely no sense of humor, however. She wanted to be a Belle Dame Sans Merci, which is to say, an unattainable, brilliant beauty admired from afar by men and women alike. Sophia declined to worship at her shrine--although she expressed her admiration in print. This, apparently, was not enough for Lorraine's attention-starved psyche. She would accept nothing less than full-on sycophancy.

Then, Sophia wrote a book. The book made a pretty Big Impression, and Lorraine was pushed out of the limelight. When time came for Sophia's tenure decision, Lorraine wrote a nasty, horrid letter for her tenure file. It was so nasty that even Sophia's professional enemies realized it was over the top, and declined to make much of it. Sophia's career crashed and burned anyway, but she made sure a few gossipy women got copies of Lorraine's poison pen letter. It made Lorraine look like the jealous harpy she was/is.  It was petty of Sophia to publicize this terrible rant, but it was the only revenge she had.

A year or two later, Lorraine changed her first name to a foreign-sounding weird moniker (that's the first time Sophia has ever used the word "moniker") that apparently means "forest dweller" in Sanskrit. For real. Sophia will call her "Anathema" here, because her new name begins with A, and she is anathema to Sophia. She's also completely off her rocker, as so often happens to humorless people when they fall gracelessly into late middle age. Sophia's evidence for this diagnosis is irrefutable: if you look at Anathema Hindenburg's Facebook page, she lists all her degrees and accomplishments. Professor of Medieval Literature, holder of endowed chair at California Party U. And the fact that she's now a certified Psychoanalyst. Yes, that's right. Sometime after trying to wreck Sophia's career, Lorraine/Anathema decided that her true calling was as a Healer of Psychic Wounds.

Oh, and her last name isn't Hindenburg. It does end in "burg," and have three syllables. But when Sophia thinks of her, she can't help but remember the immortal cover of the first Led Zeppelin album--which is also a pretty good metaphor for Sophia's academic career.

Oh, the humanity.

Anathema reappeared on Fakebook via a former colleague of Sophia's, one of her few remaining academic acquaintances. This woman, a professor at a big southern university, apparently friended Anathema, or vice versa--it doesn't matter. The point is, Anathema materialized in Sophia's tiny little Fakebook kingdom without Sophia's permission. Prior to this, Sophia liked to imagine that Anathema was withering away in a madhouse somewhere, psychically riven with guilt. Or perhaps working at a diner outside of Barstow, or Durango, having Taken to Drink around 2002. Or maybe languishing in a rooming house, her beauty long since savaged by age, disappointment, and shame.  Sophia imagined children mocking the ugly, aged Anathema as she hobbled into her 1999 Ford Fiesta, her short hair now iron gray and spiky, like oiled cotton candy.  In some of these fantasies Anathema has gained about sixty pounds, and her once-toned arms now hang like fleshy batwings. Maybe she's got an old tattoo of a rose, or a Celtic interlace design, but now it's all stretched out and faded so that it kind of loops under those fat, rubbery arms...

Can you see Sophia's Sicilian showing?  Do not assume that, had she the power to make any of this real, she would have failed to use it. Oh, no. She is no other-cheek-turner. Were she endowed with some magical ability to visit ill on her enemies from afar, she would revel in it.

Alas, Facebook ruined all these cathartic, healing fantasies. Anathema lives on, and has many more friends than Sophia.  She is still successful, and even if she's barking mad, she's got tenure, so there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Sigh.