I Am Bismark

there was an editorial in the daily unifarce by some dude from bowling green university about the olden days of facebook. lame? yes, but it did make me wax a bit nostalgic. i remember first laying eyes on facebook during the winter break of 04. i was less than two months off of my mission and i was over at dumesday’s house. one of his brothers friends was logged on and checking out girls at his university. i was admittedly skeptical, it didn’t really seem of much worth. now, remember this was before the days of applications, before the days of news feeds, before the days of non-college students, heck, before the days of photo tagging. nevertheless, i joined the crowd of freshman in the dorms and jumped on to the facebook bandwagon. i remember searching through the freshman girls on there hoping to find the name of the girl i had seen in the dorm lobby a few nights earlier. just out of curiosity i still have message threads in my inbox from january 2005 that i had sent back and forth with a crush. in fact, the way i started hooking up with first girl i dated at byu was from me finding out her name during math class, looking her up on facebook, and sending a message (so crazy seeing her at the airport last december totally preggers and with her husband). it was such a source of entertainment as a freshman… i really wonder how i got by on so little sleep. since the system was so simple back then, i remember one of the only ways of defining yourself was through the groups you were in. i think we had some pretty classic ideas for groups that semester too:

• “Get a Room: The Anti-Making Out in DT Lobbies League”: i talked about our good times with this one here though you should notice that we changed the original name to “The Anti-Making Out in Public League”. one important part of the story i had forgotten to mention: about a week after i created the group, i was sitting in the morris center cafeteria and i overhead two guys in the booth next to me start talking about the group. they claimed that the people who created it were obviously idiots and that they were probably breaking the honor code by taking girls into their rooms. they also made fun of latenighthunter because he had (still does have??) britney spears listed under his favorite music. we were so proud of ourselves that people we didn’t know were talking about us!

• “Immodest is Hottest”: haha, i am surprised we never got called in to the honor code office for this one. i am quite quite certain that i lost a lot of potential friends for being the creator and admin of this group. of course i think its important that we respect our bodies, but i just couldn’t get over the idiocy that those “modest is hottest” tshirt people were all about. and i have always just loved rustling feathers. i noticed a few messages saying how i need to follow the honor code better in my perusing message inbox.. wonderful! “shoulders are not nipples.”

• “The Coalition towards the Female Waxing of the Upper Lip”: once again, semi tongue in cheek group created in order to ruffle feathers. basically it was a rehashing of the classic “if boys aren’t allowed facial hair on campus, then girls shouldn’t be allowed to have it either”. i think i was most proud of the picture i found for the group of step by step picture instructions for the waxing process.

• “NCHO: Non-committal hang out”: latenighthunter came up with this one. talking about, joking about, and even participating in ncmo (non-committal make out) was/is all the rage among byu freshman, and this was a wonderfully clever twist. the whole return missionary/looking to get married stigma made life always a bit more interesting, so it was a good way for us to declare that just like our pre-missionary friends, we did just want to hang out with girls for fun. its even more classic because my spring term homeboy scot couldn’t figure out why the girl he was pursuing would keep going out with him but refused further commitment until he noticed that she was in this group on facebook. it all became clear.

• “The I Love Asian Women Group”: ah those freshman nights… in hindsight i think this one lost me any chance of ever hooking up with asian girls through facebook, so i guess its good i got over my yellow fever pretty quickly. now, having this group of course brought me years worth of excuses as to why i didn’t want to get into any commitment (“oh, shes not asian, so i’m not interested…"). it turns out i should have made it about mexican women, since they seem to be the ones i have found the most interest in.

anyway, i just thought i would get a few of those down for posterity’s, especially since i am no longer a part of any of them. excuse me as i become a bit serious, but i do worry about the lack of historical record that we are leaving behind in our digital age. we aren’t leaving behind letters and journals for our children’s children to read, we are leaving behind emails, blogs, and digital photos, stored on hard drives that will only keep spinning as long as there is the money and will to keep them spinning. i have been trying to keep a local copy of all of these blogs, and i hope that someday i was get around to creating a hard copy just in case blogger doesn’t exit 100 years down the road. will anyone really care that i am writing this anyway? eh, i enjoyed it at least.