Who's Your Facebook Narrator?

My Dear Reader,

I have determined that it is time for something frivilous. Facebook counts.

I probably got on Facebook before you did. Serious. I first heard about it back when mostly Ivy League people were on it (2005?). In fact, the only reason I really joined was that my Ivy League friend contacted me and asked me to create a profile. Back then, it showed all of the friends you had and what college they were from. I guess BYU was the last space she needed on Facebook College Friend Bingo. I made a profile and forgot about it, until a year later when it exploded. It's been interesting to see Facebook progress since then, especially in regards to the status updates.

You might have been there by the time the statuses started. Originally, there was a drop-down box that had about five options, kind of like this (I don't remember the exact wording):

Tell your friends what you're up to!

• At work
• Studying
• At home
• Away
• Sleeping
• Custom . . .

You clicked one of the options, and it would pop out a status with your option and "[Your name] is" as a prefix, like "Cecily is studying," or whatnot. It was a small thing on the sidebar, and who would have guessed that it would eventually outshine every other feature Facebook had. Soon, everybody was choosing the custom option, writing things that fit the "[Your name] is" prefix. It was fun and different, and it became everything that Facebook was about. And then a rival website, Twitter, popped up that had just the statuses, it was so big. But it's easy to understand, at least to me. The reason is simple:

Facebook statuses make me feel like some omniscient being is narrating my life.

I mean, if you think about it, Facebook statuses are, by default, in third person. The "is" is now optional, but you still have to start out with your name, which equals third person. So, in a way, it's like you're writing your own narration to your life. I think that's pretty cool. I'm a documentary on penguins or and eighteenth-century romance novel. And that's how I imagine it as I read them to myself. Well, as you know, narration is really only as good as the narrator. I mean, would you listen to anything narrated by Gilbert Gottfried? So I thought long and hard about who I would like to "hire" as my narrator, and I came up with . . .

George Takei.

Yup, Sulu from Star Trek. He has one of the best voices I've ever heard.

And that got me to thinking: who would you like as your Facebook narrator, Gentle Reader? Tell me, and maybe we can put together a quiz that you can annoy your friends with, courtesy of Plain Vanilla. But seriously, I want to know, so tell me in the comments. And I might actually do a quiz, so there. Trust me, the world needs to know who your narrator is!

Okay, I think that's enough frivolity for now. Come back next week for something serious and involving Batman. Honest.

Regards, best wishes, and awesome narration,

-Cecily Jane