I just realized something today. I don't know anyone who has anything. I was on Facebook and started scrolling through the newsfeed. One person got invited on a free cruise with their best friend. Somebody else thanked their parents for helping them get a house. Now you may be thinking, "Well, if they're in your newsfeed then you must know them." Nope. I've come to the sad realization that there are quite a few people in my friend list that I don't think I've ever met. And I'm not that kind of Facebook user.
It has never been my goal to have a million friends. In fact, I do a mass purge every year. There's one coming up at the end of the month. Everyone goes through a recertification process. Did you like or comment on anything on my page this year? Did I like or comment on your stuff? Are we related or do we have history that makes you indispensable? No? Then I'm afraid we're gonna have to let you go, Barack Obama.
Ironically, the people who I don't really know are the ones that I interact with most frequently on Facebook. It can be someone my wife knows and asked me to accept so that they could see pictures of my daughter. Or, someone has a friend who keeps hearing about my "hilarious" status updates and asked me to just add them so that they could read them for themselves.
These are the people who I need to get to know better. I don't want a handout, I just want to find out what their life is like. I worked on the last Census and a few of the kids there were students at Georgetown. We were talking about student loan debt. This girl said, "Thanks to parents, I don't have any loans." My naive mind took that to mean:
A) Mommy and Daddy have good credit so they qualified for the full amount of the Parent Loans.
B) Mommy and Daddy stayed on me the whole time from K-12 to make sure that I got a scholarship to college.
At NO POINT did my feeble, inner city, impoverished mind consider that she meant that her parents paid her tuition. The idea that a bill went to their house, was opened (probably with one of those pointy letter openers because they're balling outta control), and then someone wrote a check for the full amount and mailed it back in is just incredible.
That's up there with the girl that I liked in high school who, after a week of putting in some of my BEST talk game, finally invited me over her house one day on a Staff Development Day when her mother was at work. I got to her house and was taken aback by the fact that it was... a house. We poor folks have just adopted the term "house" to mean "the apartment that I live in." She had a single mom and still somehow lived in a house. They had stairs and a yard and no landlord. I was like, "Okay so did your grandmother die and leave your mom this house?"
She told me her mother bought it outright. She was a lawyer or an accountant or a baroness or something. She offered me a sandwich and she went to the fridge. I was waiting for the little round plastic thing of bologna and some store-brand white bread, but she pulled out a sub roll and a ziplock bag with the meat wrapped up in wax paper. That was the end of our courtship. I could afford an Oscar Meyer girl, but those deli meat girls were out of my league. "Did I do something wrong, Ordale?" You sure as hell did. When you said you'd never had Kraft, you talked yourself outta the best thing that ever happened to you.
[End tangent]
Where was I? Oh yeah...I want to be able to say that I know at least one person who has something. I'm not saying that my current friends aren't good enough. They are fantastic. Just the fact that the majority of my closest friends are people I met in high school says a lot. Their longevity is a testament to their character. Still...they're broke as hell. Hell, I can do that by myself. I don't want anything from anybody. I'm no moocher. I just want to say that I know a NFL player or a dude with a boat.
I can't imagine what it would have been like to have a parent pay for me to do anything, let alone go to college. The moral of my life story was, "You got any McDonalds/K.B. Toy Store/Teddy Ruxpin money?" That's not to say that my mother and grandmother didn't do anything for me...because they did. But at no point in the process did I ever feel like, 'Oh they can afford it." I went on a ski trip one February and knew that I was not allowed to ask for anything, not even the time of day, for the other ten months.
"Yes Mommy. I do want to go to see House Party with you, but um, it's like March and um...will you still be able to get me a Game Genie for Christmas if I go?" "Oh, okay...I'll just stay home and wait for it come out on tape."
Now that I think about it...I'd settle for a friend who had House Party on the official New Line Cinema manufactured VHS and not some Sony blank tape with three other movies of varying color and quality with "House Party, 48 Hours, Coming 2 America" written in black magic marker across the back.
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