Good Deeds and Personal Filters

Sometimes you do things innocently.  You know those times.  I’m not insinuating you do things deliberately – at least not in a negative way.  People reach out to you through the ‘friends request’ function of Facebook.  You attempt cursory profile evaluation.  If what you see signals an “all clear” you accept.  Probably more times than not caution tells you the physical connection isn’t there so you decline.

Things get funky and doubt may creep in when you get a one line greeting via chat reading something like “hey there”, or “hi sweetie’, or “good morning baby”, or my favorite “your hot”.  Maybe you respond, maybe you don’t.  Following the axiom that no good deed goes unpunished you respond with something easy like “I’m excellent”.  Then comes the interesting dialog.  The response is “what’s up”.  Now there’s an opportunity, a softball waiting to be slammed over the centerfield fence.

I respond with “the sky”.  The retort is “good one”.  So far innocuous, right?  Wait, there’s more.  Cordiality nudges me to write “what are you up to?”  Bad decision – or maybe good decision.  I’m of the mind to filter early and often.  You can’t have thousands of friends in the truest sense of the word “friend”.  There’s only so much emotional nourishment in inventory and you can’t – I know you would if you could – nourish all of your contacts.

Onward lest I lose the thought.  The response is “laying in bed wishing you were here to give me a massage”.  After pouring a bucket of ice over the simmering coals of frustration I decide to be gentle.  “Ah honey I’m into woman.”  After a long delay the final response “That’s okay”.  Well steer excrement; of course it’s okay.  Besides, my masseuse license was revoked when my clients complained that the electrodes attached to my fingers were leaving blisters.

The last line was written tongue imbedded deeply into my cheek.  I don’t have a masseuse license and I’m not into sado-masochism.  I’m sure that will cleave a few of the pretenders from my collective.  My friends call that house cleaning.  I like that phrase – it’s appropriate for my purposes.

So you want to have thousands of friends.  You can exceed your wildest expectations of Facebook so long as you are willing to deal with a few misguided souls who will tell you they love you and want you to raise their children after the passing of their spouse in a horrible death – the marriage to be consummated after he returns from his monthly tour of duty on an oil drilling platform in the North Sea.  But if you can send him you bank account number he’ll wire you some money for your plane ticket to a fictitious town in a non-existent country to enable the nuptial.

Yes these are isolated incidents – but only because of a little “pre-friend filtering”.  Have fun with your Facebook endeavors and you’ll have bunches of friends that will be as fragrant and beautiful as lilies of the valley.

Love and hugs, Nikki DiCaro