The Value of a Friendship

(This image was originally used to illustrate an article in the New York Times about people who were deleting their Facebook pages in the face of unpopular changes to the site's privacy settings. The article was sounding a mass exodus and portended the site's inevitable decline. That was over a year ago, or, put another way, millions of new users ago. While this original intention seems hopelessly naive, I feel the image is eerily appropriate for my subject).

Aaron Hacker, a boy I went to school with, killed himself this week. I hadn't been in touch. I only saw him once after we graduated, but he was a regular acquaintance back in the proverbial day.

Of course this is tragic for him, his family, and those who have remained close to him. For me it is merely a time to reflect on someone who was smart and kind and fun, and offer my good thoughts of him into the ether. I am very sorry this happened, but I am not going to pretend we were closer than we were out of guilt or some perverse need to be attached to tragedy or even because I feel I ought to be more broken up about something as significant as the end of someone's life.

I don't mean to sound unsentimental. I have experience with losing a friend to suicide and I know it can be devastating. I only mean to frame it honestly.

Sticking with a long-imagined escape plan, I moved away from Marion, OH when I was 17. I never looked back. Apart from my art teacher, I did not have contact with anyone from high school for ten years. So, in a way, most of the people I went to school with have already died. I will not see them or hang out with them ever again. They are stuck in time, perpetual teenagers, my classmates, my ex-girlfriends, my enemies. They will all eventually die, tragically or naturally, and the more time that passes the less this will sting. Death is always painful in the abstract, but it is only through our proximity to it that we feel this pain acutely. In other words, I felt shock and surprise when I heard about Aaron,  but I didn't cry. Indeed the aspects that make his death of note (to me) are his young age, which is always more tragic, and the fact that it came by his own hand, no doubt at the end of a long bout of suffering.
...

A few years ago the gulf between me and my former peers suddenly closed. After a long holdout under the philosophy that I did not need yet another email address, I joined Facebook. I continue to have mixed feelings about it: I do not check my page very often; I do not update my status with any regularity; I most certainly do not need another website to spend hours on. It can feel very wasteful, not to mention voyeuristic, secretly perusing the people of your past from an undisclosed location, reconnecting (but not really) with older, often puffier versions of the people we used to call our friends.

When I joined, I felt Facebook had reached a critical mass. It seemed like the people who were going to sign up had done so and I kept thinking the party was winding down. Years later I can see how wrong I was. Facebook's arms are much longer than they first appeared. My parents, my aunts and uncles, my little cousins, all these people that heretofore had been mostly absent on the internet were suddenly here, posting pictures and commenting on my wall. And of course more and more people I can only scarcely remember or who I haven't thought of since I last saw them keep arriving. At this point I have been so inundated with these shadows that I cannot honestly say all my 'friends' are people I recognize, let alone liked. By the time of this writing, my Facebook page states that I have 304 friends. Wouldn't that be nice?

Still it's not all bad. When I became a member I understood what I was signing on for. I realized that I would once more become visible to a large group of people who had either not been looking for me or else could not find me. Facebook made it not only possible, but socially acceptable to get in touch. Before it would have seemed incredibly creepy to receive an email from someone you haven't seen in twenty years but who used to live near you in elementary school. Now it's no big deal. And this is part of Facebook's appeal (for us older users anyway). Of course it's great for sending messages or invitations to our current networks, be they friends, relatives, or part of our communities, but it's also a way to delve back into our past without overcommitting ourselves. Suddenly we can all check in on the people we haven't wanted to keep in touch with, lest we would have.

A few times it has been downright thrilling to see someone I'd all but forgotten about. Filled with nostalgia we will send a flurry of emails catching up on the last decade, like Cliffs Notes of our adult lives. Other times I can see that I am more excited than they are about our encounter (inquiries into how they've been were ignored, a fact that while not exactly perturbing does make me wonder why they signed up in the first place). Still other times I have found myself unable to friend people with whom I was absolutely not friendly with when we actually knew each other. It always makes me feel a little petty, turning down a request that requires so little of me, being friends in name only, but I have a long memory and some people just weren't very nice to me. I realize others may well feel this way about me, but to the best of my knowledge no one has denied a request from me. Perhaps they merely shrugged and accepted my request, hard feelings be damned. If so, I applaud them. They are clearly better humans than me.

As a facebooker, I am not very solicitous. I do not make a point of declining friends even if the label friend is an exaggeration, but I also do not make a point of collecting the acceptances of everyone I recognize. I am aware of the tenuousness of what a friend is in this new era. Generally speaking, I will wait to be invited by others if they were not someone I considered an actual friend. But this creates a wide net with strange gaps in it. There are quite a few people I see online who are no more or less old friends than many of those whose invitations I have already accepted. The only difference is that sometimes I seem to be in a more gregarious mood and I will suddenly initiate contact. Sometimes it comes down to a single instance in which this person and I shared a laugh. And sometimes a person, although never anything but friendly, represents nothing more than an innocuous position in my mind. They are probably perfectly good people, and I wish no ill will toward them. But in my book they are neutral. And how sad it sounds to say that. How small and selfish my life feels that it does not, or cannot, include everyone to a meaningful extent.

In this way, Facebook both succeeds and fails. By centralizing (I refer to it as the hallway of the internet) our online presence, it makes our interactions far more orderly and simple. Like the high school hallway, information can spread like a forest fire, irreparably and instantaneously. But its potential as a means to connect is somewhat displaced by virtue of how the internet works. Its passivity is a primary reason for its popularity. We can reconnect with all these people because we don't have to do anything; we just look. And once the initial curiosity of how my old classmates are doing—whether they've gained weight, or are still hot, or finally came out of the closet—there is no lasting interest. I do not continue to reach out to them. I saw them, and that ought to be enough for at least another decade, if not the rest of my life, or the rest of theirs, as the case may be.

So, Facebook really is just a big keg party. It's a perpetual reunion with everyone you've ever met. You can come and go as you please, but I'm not sure how much it helps anyone. Its promise of interconnectivity is either false or else just better suited to those of us who are excellent self-promoters. The rest of us are probably just as isolated as we were before we created our profiles. In Aaron's case, his page says he had 206 friends. If that were true I have to think he'd still be alive.

Although I had not so much as heard Aaron's name for several years, I learned of his death the very next day, (on Facebook). Part of this may be attributed to the somewhat sensational nature of his death (suicide is always going to prompt more gossip than other untimely ends), but I was also struck by the rapidity with which information now travels. It came across the wire with the speed a breaking news story previously reserved for celebrities*. That a person from my own social sphere, with whom I am not in contact, can die on the other side of the country and I can hear about it within a few hours is a breathtaking collapse of the old means of communication, such as telephones or even mass emails.
...

I can't remember the last time I thought about Aaron, but if I had known he was on Facebook I likely would have been friends with him too. He would probably have ranked among the dozens I do not communicate with beyond our initial invitations.

Ostensibly, Facebook provides the possibility of second chances to reach out to the people around us. But for a litany of reasons, all perfectly good, we do not. We allow our cursory greetings and terse exchanges to stand in for relationships. In a way this makes it all worse. It would arguably be better to remain oblivious. By expanding our consciousness to include those we had nearly forgotten we risk being consumed by the multiplication of grief in all those deaths, or else we risk being spread so thin that death no longer affects us at all. Even had I been friends with Aaron via the new internet, he would not have risen above the status of Somebody That I Used to Know.

His page is still up. I don't know what the official Facebook policy is for the deceased. Perhaps the family can request it be removed. Or maybe it will just languish, frozen in a state of nonupdatedness like those who abandon their pages.

Intellectually, I know there is probably nothing I could have done to prevent this. Still, a natural part of suicide is the feeling that the survivors might have done more. When a person decides to end their own life once cannot help but feel that it reflects badly on them for not being more, what?, awake? generous? psychic?

When my friend Sarah killed herself, over a decade ago now, I kept waiting for a letter to arrive in my parents' mailbox. I desperately wanted one more time to hear from her. I felt I was owed an explanation. I felt cheated out of the intimacy we shared, like she'd hung up on me and never called back and then moved away. I felt like I'd tried to be her friend but it wasn't enough. I felt guilt like I've never known, and there was no way to make it stop since she left without a word to anyone. All of a sudden she was just gone, and the idea that it was her choice was hard to forgive.

Aaron's last status update was over two months ago. As someone who has gone through this, I keep wishing one more update would appear for all those who feel his loss more deeply than I do. And perhaps as much for him as for my friend Sarah I want it to be true. I want it to say Aaron Hacker is at peace now.

* I once read that news of Lincoln's assassination did not reach the West for many weeks. However, I read this as a handwritten note in the margin of a text, so the validity is questionable, but it is a vivid anecdote nonetheless.

Class Clowns vs. Teacher's Pets

Quail Man and Quail Dog: A Fashion Inspiration

When I was in grade school (and in middle school and high school) I used to get into trouble. I would be talking while the teacher was talking and they would interrupt me, tell me to be quiet, walk purposefully to the far end of the chalkboard, and write “John”. If I still hadn’t learned my lesson and I continued to talk, they would walk back to the far end of the board and, with a backwards glance, silently add a check mark next to it.

The teachers believed that this was a form of punishment. They all decided at some education conference before 1983 that if you wrote a student’s name on the board, said student would correct their behavior. And I think they were probably right. The first time I got my name on the board, I would wager that I didn’t talk again for the rest of the day. Mission accomplished.

The problem with this system is that after you have had your name on the board a few times you realize that that is the extent of the action against you. Your name was erased from the board that night by the janitors and you didn’t have to go to the principal until you got 2 check marks, a near statistical impossibility in a 40-minute class period.

The other problem with this system is that it relies on the hope that the student does not wish to be singled out. So much of the behavior in school is driven by a desire to fit in. To stand out, to draw attention to oneself, is to open oneself up to criticism and ridicule… unless you are the class clown. When you are the class clown, ridicule is the highest form of praise. I once wore my underwear on the outside of my gym shorts on a dare.

What the teachers never understood was that by acknowledging me, even in a way that they deemed negative, they were feeding me the very thing that I craved. I was talking in class to get attention from my fellow students, usually a select few friends. By stopping the lessons and writing my name, the teachers were putting all the attention on me. My name on the board was like having it on the marquee. I was famous!

Where I ran into the real trouble was at parent/teacher meetings. Throughout my schooling, these meetings fell on the second week of November, which meant that I always got a 4-day weekend for my birthday, and this was a mixed blessing if ever there was one. If the meeting was on Monday, my birthday had most likely already happened; presents were received, sleepovers were allowed. However, if the meeting was on Friday it meant that I now had 4 days off in which to be in trouble. Every year it was the same conversation. The teacher would say that I was disruptive, that I didn’t follow directions, and that I was getting my name on the board a lot.

My parents are nice people. They expected me to get good grades, (I did for the most part), and they were never hard on me as long as I got B’s. That said, they would come home from these meetings in a mighty pissy mood. Maybe it was generational, maybe it was because they were not themselves class clowns, but the idea of their son’s name on the board was a topic of great shame to them. It was like a horrible secret between the janitor and me had been unearthed. My defense was as unwavering as it was unconvincing.

“My teacher hates me,” I would say.
“Why?”
“Because they’re mean.”

According to my testimony, I had the most hateful and cruel line-up of teachers in the history of public schooling. For some reason, my parents never accepted this explanation.

A little older, a little more schooling (and even some teaching) under my belt, I can see the role that I may have played in all of this for what it was. In reality, I was a jerk, and just a lousy student. I had no interest in homework, or lectures, or anything really that wasn’t attached to a pair of shaved legs. But I stand by my original sentiment.

The thing that I like about this reasoning is that, while it misses the point of why I was getting in trouble, I still think it is completely true. Many of my teachers didn’t like me. And even more of them were just mean. On television, or in movies, you see the teacher as an empathetic character that reaches out to the kids who cause them the most problems. They become like a guardian figure and unlock the hidden potential in a child that will help he or she overcome their behavioral problems. They willingly spend time outside of class to help, and they actually seem to be enjoying themselves.

In reality, those teachers probably don’t exist. And if they do, they are probably dying of a brain tumor or something so they have vowed to embrace life. As to the rest of them, they are just people trying to get through a workday. I was just a kid who made their workday a little more annoying. For that I am sorry.

…

Last month I enrolled in what will be my 7th year of education outside of high school. I could tell you a few stories of teachers that, through positive and negative influence, taught me some valuable lessons about life. But that is for another time. For now, suffice it to say that I learned to become a good student sometime in my freshman year of college, and learned to enjoy education in general. Unfortunately, I am still perfecting my new positive outlook.

The major difference between then and now is that I quit a job to go to school. This being the case, there is a heightened sense of pressure to get just stupendous grades since I can’t claim that I am too busy with anything else. All I have is school, and this has made me eerily eager and annoying. I come to every class, usually early. I sit near the front and take notes. I don’t talk, and in fact roll my eyes at the students who talk or text throughout. I ask and answer questions, and bring in articles I’ve read that pertain to the subject. In other words, I am a flippin Teacher’s Pet. Oh, the irony! The symmetry! Of course, I am learning that the teacher’s treatment of the students, no matter their roles, is more static than I would have thought. Put another way, my teachers still don’t seem to like me.

I always assumed that the Teacher’s Pets were a welcome face in a hostile and indifferent crowd. I figured that they were treated with kindness, or something resembling gratefulness. I believed they embodied everything that a teacher wants in a student. As the class clown, I saw in them my opposite – studious, attentive, courteous, deferential. I loathed them and their obedience. I pitied them for their myopia. A few weeks into my new field of study, I can only surmise that the teachers concur.

Viewed now from both ends of the spectrum – someone just doodling and coasting through class, and someone that attempts to be engaged and who does their assignments before they are due – I am regarded in the same uninspiring manner no matter how I apply myself. And in a way it's worse now because I feel like I am invested in the assignments, whereas my teachers don't seem to want to return the favor. My attempts to make conversation after class have been met with weary distraction as they pack their bags to leave. My email regarding the length of an assignment – 9 paragraphs of bioethical discussions – was answered in the tersest of messages; “1-2 pages TOTAL”. (9 paragraphs on 1 page?! How is that even possible?) And, just to prove I’m not being paranoid, twice I have had to confront my teachers regarding my grade on a paper.

Thinking my score was surprisingly low, I approached the man who insists that we call him ‘Professor’ to inquire. With a sigh he looked over the paragraph in question and awarded me more points without so much as an explanation as to why they were negated in the first place. In another instance, I again had to wait around for the teacher after class to point out an entire paragraph (out of only 3) that discussed in detail the very topic she was claiming I had left out. Later, when I received a lowered unit score for spotty attendance I again had to corner the Professor and show him the notes that were taken on the days in dispute. Worst of all was when a teacher just added my test score incorrectly because she was in too big a hurry to do basic arithmetic. I feel as though I am being cheated out of points, and I have to fight for things I have already earned. When I was still not awarded full points for attendance, I just let it go. It’s tiresome, and though I believe I am right I’m afraid it makes me seem like a whiner. I see the teachers begin to wince as I approach their desk while the other students head for the door. They act like it's a great favor to change my grade.

My wife likes to mention ‘High School Me’, a younger version of herself, as a barometer for how square and compromising she has become in her adulthood. High School Her is always shaking her head at her. And it’s true. As teenagers, we were imperfect, immature people. But we had real convictions, and the energy to back them up. High School Me wouldn’t care about the grades. He wouldn’t study so hard. He would be happy with an A-. And he sure as hell wouldn’t need the approval of a bunch of people who were just too lazy to do their jobs right. Life is too short for that. Now, let's ditch and go smoke a cigarette.