My Place on MySpace

I’ve been in the midst of a severe spiritual crisis these past few weeks, ever since my best friend on MySpace friend dropped me from number four to number 20 on his list of friends. For those who aren’t familiar with MySpace, MySpace is basically an online forum for people to share their private journals with the world. (Why anyone would want to do this, I don’t know.)

It’s kind of like seventh grade, or at least what I imagine life would have been like in seventh grade, if I had been cool enough to be aware of it at the time. The way MySpace works is that everyone has “friends.” You invite people to be your “friend” or they invite you to be their “friend.” Once you become “friends” with someone, you rank them in the order of importance on your list of MySpace friends. This list can be very changeable. It’s like that in real life, too, where on some days or weeks or months, you feel closer to some friends rather than others. The only difference is that on MySpace, you have an actual quantifiable barometer of how your friendships are doing with other people. I was never really aware of this virtual pecking order until a good friend of mine, “X.”—the one who had gotten me to join MySpacein the first place—pointed it out to me.

He called me up one day and said, “Have you been checking your ranking on my list of friends lately? You’re at number four—in my top eight favorite friends!”

So, I logged onto MySpace and saw that I was in fact at number four—out of 226 friends. Out of 226 friends, I was number four! It’s hard to describe how important that made me feel. So, every day, after that, for months and months, I began checking my ranking on X’s MySpace page, just like some people rush to buy the morning papers to check the stocks. I was crestfallen as I watched my status drop from number four to eight to 12.

When I hit number 12, I thought it was time to call X up and have a “talk.” It wasn’t even that I had any romantic interest in him or he had any romantic interest in me. But still, it hurt. In mid-dial, though, I hung up the phone. This is ridiculous, I thought. There I was, a supposedly grown up, professional woman with a closet full of business suits, about to call up my friend and ask him why I was his number 12 friend and not his number four friend.

I could understand why I wasn’t number one. His girlfriend was number one, which was totally understandable. His best male friend, who was very emotionally needy and in essence a second girlfriend, was number two. He would have been devastated if he wasn’t number two, so he had to be number two. I didn’t know the third person, so I decided not to worry about her.

I couldn’t understand what was happening, since X would call me up several times a week and we would have hour-long heart-to-heart talks about all kinds of things. At the end of each phone conversation, he would always say, “It was great talking to you. You are so awesome. I’m so glad I called.”

It didn’t make any sense then, why after each phone call, I kept getting dropped further and further down his list of friends. In the span of just two short months, I went from number four to number 20. The more I talked to him, the less he seemed to value my friendship. That wasn’t a good sign, I thought. I considered lowering his ranking from my list of friends, too, but I thought that would be petty. (Besides, I didn’t have 226 friends like he did, so I had far fewer people to choose from.) Finally, I decided that I would have to stop talking to him so much if I didn’t want to lose my place on his MySpace list of friends completely, which I know, doesn’t make any sense at all, either.

But then again, I am still in the charts.

(Readers can e-mail Lisa at lisal@thegrid.net.)