J. Alfred Prufrock and Facebook

If you have taken an English class, you probably have read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” (If not, feel free to take a cyber trip to read it at http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html.) Anyway, I have found myself thinking of J. Alfred quite often lately as I muse about my newly found addiction to …. I hate to even say it …. Facebook. Yes, that evil pop culture leviathan has captured me and refuses to relinquish its hold.

What, you ask, does this have to do with T.S. Eliot’s speaker in his famous poem? The answer is simple -- well as simple as it is to downgrade a poetic icon to a contemporary outcast. J. Alfred comments on his social circle in the same detached (read: alienated), disinterested (read: unwelcomed), condescending (read: yearning) attitude with which I viewed Facebook. I sincerely believed Facebook was for people who had too much time on their hands, something that I NEVER can find on my hands (not even in my pockets), so I resisted. UNTIL, my friends had a Christmas party, and there I was, J. Alfred, feeling old, as though I had “seen the moment of my greatness flicker” while listening to my friends “come and go / Speaking of Michelangelo.” OK, they weren’t even remotely speaking of Michelangelo, but they were speaking of walls and pictures and even games that all are part of the Facebook realm, and I thought, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Well, no, that’s what J. Alfred thought, but it probably is more eloquent than whatever sorry state of self-imposed loneliness I was experiencing. SO, I did it. I joined. I am in the world again, at least the virtual one. I have reconnected with a multitude of people, some of whom probably even like me in the physical world.

So now I venture forth to “[measure] out my life with coffee spoons,” albeit the electronic kind. I guess at this point “Nicole is . . . finished.”