look, look, I managed another blog

As many of you know, I'm on Facebook. Yes, yes, I can hear the hisses and moans from you all the way from here. But there it is, and what's more, I'm becoming a sort of junkie.

Now, the thing that I LOVE about the internet is that you can go places anonymously. I can shop, read, even be a voyeur, and I'm still invisible. Facebook has challenged that. Now, who I am seems to be available to more people than I feel comfortable with.

The networking system that they have cleverly managed to create puts you in contact with friends, family, and sometimes with people that you haven't talked to in years. Sometimes reconnecting with those people is fun and sometimes even devilishly exciting. On the other hand, those reconnections do erode our carefully guarded invisibility. I had been okay with that until yesterday.

Here's what happened. For those of you that aren't Facebookers, I'll tell you that you can post a statement that tells your friends what you are doing at any given moment. Most people put in stuff like, "Katherine is working" or "Katherine wishes she was in Italy sipping wine." Yesterday, I wrote:

Katherine is so sick of gas shortages that she is ALMOST ready to agree to more offshore drilling. ALMOST.

This was my attempt to make light of the INCREDIBLE frustration of spending 2 hours getting gasoline, watching people behave badly, and wondering how do we solve this problem. I was trying to be a little funny, but I was poking fun too at how most of the people around me -- and all of the people jumping in line -- were driving big gas guzzlers.

And to the heart of it...

A guy that I haven't seen in 20 years, but who is my "friend" on Facebook, begins commenting on my page with the kind of completely ignorant conservative rhetoric that has a particular brand in South Alabama. Then, a better friend from grad school in Dallas -- haven't seen her in nearly 10 years -- begins to rant back at him with more sensible, but still partisan, points to argue that we should not do offshore drilling. I am trying to excuse her by thinking that she was defending me (or what she thinks I would think).

Now, on some level, this does not matter at all. But here's what I find myself thinking: WTF??? These two people don't know each other, and really, they don't know me well either. When did we get the idea that it is acceptable to use another person's words, time, and space for our own soap boxes. After 14 (I'm not kidding) posts back and forth on my page, they finally agreed that this was not the place for such banter.

Maybe I'm too sensitive or too protective of my turf, but I don't want ANY conservative crap on my page (no offensive intended to my smarter conservative friends who would never do such a thing). I started to wonder about the Obama yard signs and car magnets that keep disappearing: a sense of entitlement that doesn't know its boundaries. I remember in Auburn some liberal friends made W stickers that had the red NO symbol across them, and they went around putting them over the regular W stickers on cars. At the time, I thought it funny. Now, I've changed my mind.

We all have the right to our own opinions. But those opinions should be given only in the appropriate places and times.