Things I Learned From Facebook

1. You don't have to tell everybody everything. You really don't.

So often, I go on Facebook and I end up reading things that I didn't necessarily need to know. Those annoying pregnancy trackers aside (Note: congratulations and all that, but I don't give a shit what your baby looks like until it comes out), I see a lot of mindless, meaningless fluff and chatter on Facebook that honestly becomes irritating to me. I feel bad saying this because I know some people get off on small talk, but...no. You know what? I don't feel bad, because I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way and I reserve the right to have my own opinion without having to explain or defend every single thing I say.

2. And they probably don't care most of the time, anyway.

This is true. Most people probably don't care, and I'm guilty as charged from both sides of the fence. I realize that when I post a nauseatingly cute photo of my cat, some people might be like, "Enough with the cat already!" I guess I post it for the few who will appreciate it, and everyone else is just gonna have to deal. When you make a post online for many people to see, it's really very difficult to pick and choose your audience...that's just how it goes on the Interwebz. Nothing new here...just a different format.

3. This is nothing personal...really. It isn't.

It isn't. Just because I don't care what you had for dinner doesn't mean I don't like you or find your other posts a little more interesting. So quit crying already.

4. You don't have to be friends with everyone. You really don't.

It's totally okay to decide not to be someone's friend, whether on Facebook or otherwise. I think when I was younger, I felt sort of a social pressure to maintain friendships even if they were possibly harmful to me, or if I no longer had anything in common with that person or something.

Every time I'd end up having a falling-out with someone, I'd feel really guilty about it and developed this policy that I never wanted to burn a bridge or have bad karma with anyone. But as you get older and you get away from the college experience a bit-where socializing is basically forced upon you-, you start to realize how impossible it is to maintain this standard, and that furthermore, you're under no social obligation to make friends with everybody.

Facebook has a way of trivializing "friendships" that to me, is sort of shallow and obnoxious. It got worse when they introduced the tiers of friends: "close friends," "acquaintances," and so on. I've managed to end up with a lot of people on my Friends list who seem nice enough, but I couldn't tell you for the life of me what they look like, what their favorite color is, or how we met, if at all.

I'm just not into that sort of thing. I have a handful of close friends and I appreciate them deeply...Facebook doesn't really do a very good job of encompassing how much I care about them. It's a great way to communicate via Chat and Messages with people who you already know and just want to talk to, if you can't go see them in person. But to build an entire social life based on online communication? Well, 10-15 years ago, it would automatically brand you a social outcast and a weirdo. Go figure that it's perfectly acceptable- and encouraged- now.

5. There is a significant difference between a "friend" and an "acquaintance."

See above.

6. Sometimes the past should stay in the past, and sometimes you should reach out and keep in touch with people better.

But in either case, it's your decision, and you shouldn't feel compelled to talk to your grade school pals just because they're on your Friends list. If you don't want someone tagging you in awkward photos from the 90's, just say so with a little grace and most people will understand, because nobody should ever have to see photos of you wearing Umbros with your bangs parted in the middle.

7. Most people can't write for shit.

I'm sorry to say this and to risk sounding like a snobby bitch from the bowels of academia, but it's the truth. Even when people manage to master the fine distinction between "your" and "you're," I'm constantly appalled at the clunkiness of their statements and the rampant "text-speak." Even when I post from my phone, I try to at least show some sort of proof that I can speak and write English pretty well.

8. Big Brother is watching you poop.

It's bad enough that I still dredge up things I wrote on the Internet ten years ago that I kinda wish I could delete from the Internet and un-Google somehow. But to now have Facebook harvesting information about me that could lead to God knows what? It's just too much. While I don't buy into all the Orwellian paranoia, I do find apps like Girls Around Me disturbing, and I think Facebook has made people far too casual when it comes to revealing personal information online.

On a related note, I also find it sad that the Internet has become such a wasteland for our culture. Doesn't anybody care that kids will grow up without knowing what books, CDs, or pay phones are? That all of their history will be on the Internet on a cloud somewhere, instead of in tattered photo albums and worn videos (or even DVDs)?

To put it in a less archaic, Luddite fashion, let me just ask you this. Nostalgia aside, if the Facebook server went down and everybody's profiles were wiped out, what would you lose? And does that bother you? Would you lose your favorite vacation photos? Your funny Notes? Your Messages from beloved friends and family? Doesn't it scare you to think about that information someday being completely inaccessible? Isn't it weird to have your whole life online?

It bothers me a little bit. It always has, and that's why- like a squirrel harvesting nuts for the winter- I bury my information in various places so I can dig it up in more than one spot if I have to: on my hard drive, on external drives, in notebooks, on Livejournal, on this blog, and on Facebook and MySpace. I try to duplicate as much as I can when it comes to saving my writing, music, and photos, because that way if something happens, I won't be totally up shit creek. Every year or so, I go through everything I can find and I decide what I still want to share, and what I want to save for myself.

Facebook has complicated this process because when everybody was forced onto Timeline, I'm willing to bet I wasn't the only one scrambling to partition my profile in such a way that not everyone on my Friends list could see everything. Why? Because as Talk Talk says, it's my life!

As the Internet becomes a necessity, a utility right up there with electricity and gas, my advice to anyone on it is to tread carefully and try to think ahead to 2022...in ten years, what do you want to leave behind? When I look at some of what I wrote and posted online ten years ago versus now, I really wish I could edit it a little more carefully.

Then again, it's thanks to Facebook that I finally developed a better sense of boundaries about these things...somehow, once everybody else started sharing everything, I began to withdraw. And now, I don't really know what's on my mind...all I know is that I don't really feel like telling everybody.

My Grandfather

My grandfather looked like Gregory Peck. Despite spending more of his life behind the camera than in front of it, he was very photogenic. He had an intensity to his eyes which my dad and I both inherited, a serious look which could turn into a smile at any moment. Even as he grew old and stooped, my grandfather was impressively tall; between him and my great-uncle, my dad- at 6'2- is the shortest of the Wengenroth men. Go figure.

But what is there really to say, and where do I start? How do I describe someone who I loved so much and only knew for a mere third of his entire life anyway? How do I capture his memory in a way that keeps it fresh and sweet in my heart as I myself grow older? For nearly a month, I have held off on truly and fully gathering my thoughts on the sad and inevitable passing of my grandfather; my dad's dad. I didn't post it on Facebook as a status update because I felt like it would cheapen his memory to do so. People can announce the births of their children in such a manner, but I wanted this moment as something real and not a virtual snippet of information in cyberspace. In fact, I didn't talk about it much to anyone except close friends and my family. And my family didn't even really talk much about it until this weekend, when we all gathered in Florida on a beautiful sunny day to commemorate him and celebrate the life he had.

Even as I write this, the winter sun is dropping lower in the sky and I feel slightly ashamed to miss it, but after all, it's 40 degrees here anyway; who am I kidding? In longing for summer, I am reminded of the steamy July day that a thunderstorm struck Brooklyn while I was at the beach, and the quality of the light was so breathtaking, that I went all the way back home to grab my camera…and all the way back to the beach, practically throwing myself onto the sand in my haste to catch the light before it was gone. As the sun set, the sky turned a bloody orange smudged with ominous gray, the clouds rolled in, and the water churned as it began to rain lightly, casting the world in a shimmering mist. I ran to a bodega to get batteries (my older digital camera required a whopping eight AA batteries!) and headed towards Coney Island, snapping photos the whole time. I was so caught up in the rush of capturing a beautiful image, in the pleasure of seeing, that before I knew it, the sun had set and it was dark. I stared at Astroland Park in the darkness, looking so picturesque and timeless. I sent an excited email to my grandfather, describing my photographic expedition and enclosing an amount of photos which probably crashed his browser.

His response is one of my fondest memories of him because to me, it sums up his character so well and it was one of the things I loved; not only was he supportive of my interest in photography, but he was a gracious and helpful critic. "I particularly like the Astroland Park photos," he wrote, "the quality of the light is beautiful. But have you thought about getting a tripod?" In my excitement, there were a few shots which had a slightly Dutch angle to them. But with a little Photoshop tweaking, they were perfect. This was what Grandpa and I shared; a love for chocolate (which I'm convinced is genetic, as my dad inherited it too!) and for the streets of Brooklyn, and a love for photography...a need to capture an image, to preserve a moment in time.

How strange to look at photos he took, and photos of him, when time has run out and he has passed on, but not before leaving- as the Longfellow poem says- footprints in the sands of time. I remember going to a photography expo with him in Boston, where he bought me my 35mm camera so I could take a photography class in high school. It's a Canon FTB and I still have it. Unfortunately, it's notorious for a faulty shutter and the last roll I shot came out with a hard black line obscuring half the frame. But that camera and I got along quite well, and it still sits on a shelf in my apartment; people can kill off film all they want, but that camera is mine forever. During that same time, I remember watching him work in his darkroom at the house on Culver Lake, first developing and then printing stunning color photographs. I felt so privileged to be included in the Wengenroth circle of creative, hard-working engineers, thinkers, and artists, awe-struck as I watched Grandpa work patiently and carefully to craft these images. I would stand in the hallway of the house at the Lake and just stare at his photographs, from a portrait of my Nana's cat Lulu ( she definitely missed her calling to be in a cat calendar…) to stunning panoramic shots of the lake and the woods.

As if watching a slide show in my mind's eye, I flip back a bit further, and I'm reminded of all the time we would always spend outside, whether at Culver Lake, in Stoke State Forest, or up at Mohonk…such a part of my family's history that when I took a trip to Mohonk by myself for a film shoot a few years ago, I found myself expecting to see them hiking along the trails beside me. The house at Culver Lake was not just any house, you see. My grandfather built that house. It wasn't until I began getting a sense of the work my dad does (my dad "flips houses" to use the trendy phrase), that I fully understood how incredible it is that my grandfather built that house for his family. Of course now, the Lake has changed and grown into McMansions and tastelessness, and the house was torn down. I was enraged and devastated when I found out; how could something so precious be ended, just like that?

And yet, that's how it was. Grandpa turned 90 in September and was greeted with a compilation of family memories, written by everyone in the Wengenroth clan. His health had seriously declined in the past few years, as COPD and an aneurysm in his stomach seemed to be in a race to the finish. As was typical of his generation, he dealt with the inconveniences of old age and sickness, by…well, by just dealing with it. "Well, actually, I'm bored," he said to me when I asked how he was doing. "I can't really take photos much anymore, so now I just look at them." I remember feeling furious and sad with the world on the day that I called him from my new smartphone and he couldn't hear me because the audio quality is just not as good as it is a regular phone. Somehow, that was the moment when he truly seemed old to me, despite the fact that he'd had hearing aids for quite some time (being too close to a gunshot blast in the Navy will do that to you). I employed Nana as my translator and followed up with an email. I hung up with a lump in my throat. I was in my 20's, he was in his 80's, and all of a sudden, just like that, time was ticking.

When I walked into the church yesterday and saw a photograph of him, smiling with kind eyes and looking surprisingly radiant for such an old man, I thought to myself, "What a perfect photo of him." When I saw the simple wooden box containing his ashes, I thought to myself, "What a perfect box for him." And then when I saw the American flag, folded into a triangle and placed in a glass case, that was when my eyes blurred, my throat closed up, and I broke out in a sweat as I tried- in some ridiculous attempt to be calm and level-headed - not to cry. Even as my eye makeup ran down my face and my entire body tensed trying to hold in the tears, I wanted to unclench my jaw and just sob without abandon at the gaping sense of loss I felt for my family. Because when I saw that flag, that was when it hit me that he had lived such a full and long life, of which I should have learned more. I thought of all the things I wanted to ask him about that will now go unanswered. I was struck by this absurdly childish and profound realization that my grandfather was once a cute guy in the Navy, a gangly young man with big ears and a big nose, that my grandfather was once a boy building model airplanes in Flatbush, Brooklyn, probably a twenty-minute walk from where I live now. Something about those faded stars folded into that familiar triangle, knocked my grandfather's life into a perspective which I had rarely considered; the entire thing. I thought how incredible it was that he served his country, that he survived the turmoil of his wife's untimely death at age 43 and the merging of two families upon his remarriage to my Nana (it was like the Brady Bunch only more interesting), that he built a house for his family, that he created beautiful things. He was an artist and an engineer and a woodworker and a photographer and a little boy riding the Cyclone at Coney Island. He was standing on the roof of the house at Culver Lake putting on the finishing touches. He was carefully sanding the wooden bowl which sits on my dresser filled with shells from all the beaches I've been to. He was a cornerstone of my childhood and my brother's childhood, part of a symmetry of our family, a force in my life who gave me a way to express myself as a teenager.

My uncles and my dad got up to speak. My uncle Dan spoke of the time that the family dog went off into the cold woods to have her puppies one night, and how Grandpa went out and brought them all back safe and sound. My uncle Phil spoke of how he was the black sheep, yet when he went to grad school, he saw a pride in Grandpa's eyes that he will never forget. My great-uncle Dick spoke of their childhood together. I pictured two little boys jumping on the bed in a little house in Flatbush, whacking each other with pillows while meanwhile, the country was in the grips of the Depression. I pictured Grandpa as a boy working painstakingly on model airplanes. Dick reminisced about their boyhood summers at Culver Lake, then the winter ice-skating and playing in the snow. Then his voice broke as he said softly, "I am so grateful for those memories." My dad was more uplifting than I thought he would be, speaking of the importance of remembering a person's spirit even after they have passed on. We recited the Lord's Prayer, sang a traditional Navy hymn, and that was that. We went out to the courtyard and talked, hugged, laughed, and cried in the dazzling Florida sun. Even Nana was able to joke and smile amidst her grief; maybe that's how you get through it all. We went to the beach and walked down to the pier, leaving our own footprints in the sand, collecting shells. We talked of scattering Grandpa's ashes at Culver Lake. I stared at the ocean and wished I'd had my camera. I remembered visiting Grandpa and Nana the first year they moved down to Vero Beach and being astonished at the size and boldness of the pelicans, who seemed to pose for me as I snapped photos with my camera. Grandpa was like a human light meter; I got some great shots that day thanks to his expert eyes.

Because I had no camera yesterday, I took a picture in my mind of the bright sun, the turquoise water, the colorful shells, my cousins, brother, and parents as they walked along the shore. I watched my dad as he walked and recognized the same set of his shoulders that Grandpa had, the same thoughtfulness to his voice when he speaks, the same ears, the same eye for detail and careful hands crafting paintings, photos, and architecture…all of these things like tiny echoes of Grandpa and of our family…some of which I've also inherited. As the sun sets outside my tiny Brooklyn apartment a stone's throw from the neighborhood that my great-grandfather helped to develop (unfortunately, some of it has become the border of Bed-Stuy, but just like the realtors around here, I try to gloss over that), I feel a twinge of sadness that Grandpa will not see the way the bare, black trees frame the colors in the sky. But then I think of how lucky he was to have such a beautiful life…and how lucky I am to have such an amazing family…and because there are some things that even a photo can't capture, I sit quietly and just look.