I was going to think about de-friending you anyway.

This post is going to be self-indulgent and petty, in that way that only Facebook friend politicking can inspire. And beyond that, there's no real lesson to be learned. It's just an exercise in intertubes, social networking, drudges-up-high-school-in-that-bad-way angst. You've been warned.

I had a recent surge in Facebook friends. Partly, it was my dad's passing; a colleague in Singapore and a student in Mississippi friended me, and I thought it would be impolite to let their friend requests languish in my the way that I let certain other people's (mostly friends of friends, and my ex). These were people who knew my dad, and neither of those two were able to come to the funeral, so I thought since I would have cried in front of them and hugged them at that, it wouldn't hurt if I just hit the accept button.

The second surge came from my graduation weekend, which I spent with the childhood friend of a close friend of my mother's. My mom came into town and stayed with them in northern Jersey, and I went with her rather than have her stay in my pigsty of an apartment, and we did touristy things in the city and all that. We had a grand ole time, and we exchanged phone numbers and Facebook contacts.

So I've been noticing my friend count tick up; the highest I saw it was 336. Now, to some that's a lot; others, not at all. For me, it's an all-time high. But tonight, I see that my friend count is now down to 332 331. So, yes, to make an initial confession, I do keep track from time to time on that number. I wasn't always so anal retentive about it, but I've actually kept a list since maybe the mid or high 200s. It wasn't always quite like this; I had spent some very stable years at right around 230 and no list. But tonight, because it had been a while since I last updated anyway (319), I went through the whole list and saw that I had lost:

• a childhood friend's older brother
• a high school frenemy
• a law school underclassman
• a high school acquaintance
• a former supervisor from when I was a student rep for a bar review company

Now, I'm not heartbroken. I want to make that clear. I know childhood friend's older brother has a young family of his own and they all live across the world from me. Our families were close when he was in high school and I was in elementary school, and although I was invited to his youngest sister's wedding last year, our lives are only really ever diverging. I get it.

The law school underclassman and I were never really friends either; we served on the same executive board for a school organization, but we barely had a conversation that wasn't about that or me giving her advice on how to cope with the sheer stress of law school. She seemed to be stressing far too much.

The high school acquaintance was just that, and high school graduation was 10 years ago this year. I think I have a group picture with the two of us in it somewhere from a sad middle school Valentine's Day dance. Every time I think of her, I think of that picture from seventh or eighth grade.

The former supervisor was a Facebook goddess, with well past 800 friends the last I saw. She's gorgeous and photogenic, and she just changed jobs this January. I just looked her up again (evidently I am not blocked) and she has down to 300ish friends. I am not ashamed to be one of the pared in her case.

But the single dumbest part of this whole exercise of finding out who I'd lost in my friends flock of e-sheeples was the high school frenemy. I don't blame the others for defriending me (really and truly), but my reaction to the frenemy was I should have defriended you first. And I have mixed feelings because of this for all manner of reason. Initially, I felt that familiar frustration that I associate with her (or did, anyway, for a few years out of my young adult life), that feeling of I'm the only one playing this game. And it's all the lamer because the game, it appears, is a perverse one of social networking stock market, and I've lost.

Even the whole terming of the word frenemy, for instance, is almost certainly one sided. I have likely always been peripheral to her and her early adopter Starbucks-drinking hipster friends, and it has only been the stubborn hold of hormones that inked my adolescent brain tissue that make me think of her as anything but "some girl I had a lot of classes with." One of my chief memories of her, just to give you an example, is when my then-boyfriend and I were freshly minted as a couple in our senior year of high school, and we bumped into her and her long-term boyfriend at a play. While her boyfriend was away for the moment, she went out of her way to flirt with mine. The arm touching and giggling kind of flirting; the kind of brazen forwardness that leaves me dumbfounded even to this day. We were all classmates and they were acquaintances long before then; the only real difference was that that day he was taken, and I remember just not being able to help myself: I felt she was being malicious for the way she was acting. It felt so high schooly (and still does), it makes me want to gag.

Part of that memory flashes to the forefront of my brain every time I think of this girl. Even if that same memory doesn't come forward when I think of the whole of the relationship I had with that boyfriend (now ex. In fact, now The Ex. Which complicates the whole thing even more, I suppose.).

Pause. Really take a moment to look at this terrible loop of resentment, insecurity, and angst that I'm putting myself through.

So.

So this is it. No grand thesis. No epiphany. This is me just struggling with a semi-masochistic (semi?) relationship with Facebook -- or just my masochistic relationship with high school 10 years down the line. My solace, such as it is, is that nobody else on Facebook (or from high school) really drudges up this embarrassing resentmentinsecurityangst loop like this girl. And now that's gone. It wasn't my pushing away that did it, but I don't live in chick lit. And it's okay. It better be okay. I get to say goodbye too, to her place in my life, to the memory, and maybe to the loop.