Request.

On Sunday evening, I was on Facebook instead of writing a paper for my American Pop Culture class. As I was writing on my friend's status about something that happened to him at the Louis Vuitton store, I see the little red flag pop up over the new friends icon on the upper left hand corner of the screen. I click on it.

"Oh no. No, no, no, no."

I looked at the profile picture for a while. This person's expression looked sad, it seemed. We have 122 friends in common. Naturally. We used to be best friends.

For those who have been reading my blog for a while now, you will probably remember my post on expired friendships. I argued in that post was that some friendships are bound to fail while others are strong enough to withhold the test of time. Unfortunately, the friendship with "new friend request" had long expired. Dare I say, the mention of this person makes me wrinkle my nose as if I just sniffed some nasty, rancid milk.

We live in a curious time in terms of socializing. One of my classmates discussed his hatred of texting; he writes that people would rather text instead of actually having a conversation with a person. I completely agree. Now, we write on our friend's Facebook walls to wish them a happy birthday instead of singing to them through the phone. Or better yet, showing up to their house with balloons. We type incoherent emails instead of meeting with the person you want to talk to. Methods of everyday communication have been completely revamped thanks to the marvels of the internet and smart-phones. Sadly, some of these methods are the worse. Many people do not know how to verbalize their frustrations to someone else because they can leave this comment anonymously over the internet instead of resolving the issue. We now have a way to be completely elusive yet completely explicit. It's very strange.

To me, it's interesting to see how "new friend request" probably believed re-adding me as a friend on Facebook was a step towards possible reconciliation. I'm not sure whether to blame this person's general incompetence or the way our generation is used to dealing with problems with abstract internet actions, making it almost impossible to decipher the motives or reasons behind them. Perhaps I'm completely wrong about this. But I digress.

Let's say this person truly wanted to reconcile. Sending a friend request through a social networking site is not the way to do it. There is so much more that would need to be done than simply being friends on a website. When did people forget the fundamentals on healthy, real relationships? Where's the communication? Where is there the sincerity? You simply could not figure these things out through words typed on a page.

Maybe some people are downright clueless. About everything.