Who Cares That A Backward Roll of Toilet Paper Peeves Me?

Do any of you remember having to play �Dodgeball� in elementary school P.E. class? Or do you remember sitting in classes where the teacher would call on various students for answers, and sometimes you just sat there hoping to be as invisible as possible so s/he wouldn�t call your name and put you on the spot? Yeah? I thought so.

Well, I�ve felt a little bit like that for the past several weeks�but actually with better humor than an inept dodgeball player. You see, there�s a �25 Things About Me� list (and several variations of it) that is making its way around the internets via Facebook. No doubt, many of you have already seen it. You�re supposed to write up the list of random facts about yourself, post it for all your Facebook friends to see, and then you have to tag a bunch of your friends to do the same. And it�s all meant to be fun, random, silly, a time-waster, an excuse to be narcissistic, or whatever. It is admittedly sort of fun for me to read random stuff I either never knew (or totally forgot), or already knew about various friends. The random sharing has all been appropriate and pretty inconsequential. The thing is�..I�ve been tagged TWELVE times (and counting). The quieter I am, the more I get tagged. This sounds silly, but last week I was starting to feel a sense of dread that someone had tagged me each time I logged onto FB, and sure enough, my fear of being tagged would be confirmed by a red notification square in the lower right-hand corner of my page.

Here�s the thing: although it�s incongruous with having this diary here, I am a fairly private person in real life. FB is a place where I have an assortment of different �levels� of friends, ranging from close (e.g., my best friend from when I was 13, or people I�ve known since pre-school, or my sister), to a former neighbor, to my ex-boyfriend, to old h.s/college friends, to coworkers, to (finally) those people who I know far less well and whom I�ve befriended or accepted friend requests from for �networking purposes�. That�s all fine. But do all of them have to know or even care that I make wishes at 11:11?

Having said that, after a long struggle, I�m most likely about to cave to the pressure to come up with a list of random facts about myself. After all, it�s a great excuse to procrastinate, and who can�t use one? I�m still kind of on the fence about tagging more people, though I probably will carefully choose some friends, just to show good humor and play the game. Call me guilty, I guess. And check this: 25 Things I Didn�t Want to Know About You .