Just Kristin

Face­Book is a huge, extended-family reunion. It is a huge, extended-family reunion that you get to wan­der in and out of. As such, it is a given that you will run into some of the peo­ple dear­est to you, includ­ing a few whom you haven’t seen in ages, and you may even get to speak to them for a bit. You might also be lucky enough to nib­ble some tasty food and get the recipes, score the phone num­bers or email addresses of peo­ple you haven’t heard from in a while, play a game of extreme bocce with your cousins, or roast a few marsh­mal­lows to per­fec­tion over uncle Bert’s Weber grill. How­ever, if you take a look at the amount of time spent at the reunion, and give an hon­est account­ing of it, you will note that only 5 to 10 per­cent of your time at the reunion is spent at the above activ­i­ties. The rest of your reunion stints will be filled with: answer­ing the same ques­tions about your life posed by count­less peo­ple you should have thought but didn’t think you’d run into there, hav­ing the peo­ple you *do* want to talk to get pulled away by other fam­ily mem­bers, eat­ing copi­ous amounts of junk food, get­ting roped into play­ing stu­pid games for stu­pid (if any) prizes, lis­ten­ing to count­less bel­liger­ent drunks spew forth about what is impor­tant to them and should be impor­tant to you as well, and guilt­ing your­self into stay­ing late to help with clean up.

I love reunions, but I always end up feel­ing dis­ap­pointed and wish­ing I could have my time back. I curse myself for get­ting sucked in. Once you are there, how­ever, you can­not leave with­out hurt­ing someone’s feel­ings, or even worse, wor­ry­ing about whether any­one noticed you leave. It is a lose-lose(-lose?) situation.