Thank God I Still Have Great Hair

I’ll tell you what. You should never go to Facebook and look up people you went to high school with.

I don’t have a Facebook account, but my father does. He can’t use it because he’s demented. I haven’t deleted it; I thought it might be useful if someone he knew needed to reach me. When I want to check something out on Facebook, I use his account.

I’m very glad I don’t have a Facebook account. Social media sites are tools people use to destroy their privacy and give power to stalkers and other enemies. I do enough of that right here. I don’t need to put my education and work history, my place of residence, a list of all of my friends, my birthday, and photos of the inside of my house on the web.

When Facebook first showed up, I tried it, and I thought it was really stupid. There wasn’t much communication. It seemed like it was a bunch of no-life nerds “poking” each other and “sending each other lattes.” I didn’t get it at all. When I went back years later, it made more sense. I guess they changed it. It had become useful for posting blog-type entries and so on.

I enjoyed communicating with people I knew, and once in a while, it was fun to hear from someone from my past. Eventually, though, I got tired of it. Mainly, I got tired of watching my Christian friends get nowhere in their walks. I’m afraid I used the term “boneheads” when I discussed it with people. I meant that they were too hard-headed to learn anything.

I don’t recall when I quit for good, but I wrote about it here. I dropped my first account and went back. Then I dropped my second account. Then I created a third account which I rarely used, in case people wanted to find me. Then I decided I didn’t want to be found any more.

Today, for some reason, I started thinking about Tiffany Sessions. She was a young lady who vanished. She was from South Florida. She took me to Facebook.

Back when the story of her disappearance broke, I thought about the only Sessions I knew: J.E. Sessions. He went to my prep school. I think he was one year ahead of me; maybe it was two. A long time ago, I asked a friend if Tiffany was J.E.’s sister, and he said she was. I didn’t know if it was true, though, and tonight, out of boredom, I Googled around to find out.

I couldn’t find out much about her. I learned that her dad was named Patrick. I went to Facebook to look at his friends list, to see what I could learn. Sure enough, he had a friend who was the right age to be his son, and his first name started with J. I looked at the son’s friends, and I saw people I went to high school with. Match.

I never knew her, and I didn’t know J.E. well. He was one of the cool kids. My school wasn’t very stratified. The cool kids were not much cooler than the non-cool kids. You could be non-cool and sit with the cool kids at lunch. Still, he was cooler than I was, and he was older, so he belonged to a group of people who had to be careful how much respect they gave people in my class.

He had a van. I remember that.

I saw a photo of one of his Facebook friends. It was a girl I had known pretty well. She was very sweet back then. She was also very pretty. I was shocked when I looked at her Facebook photo. I knew I had made a mistake. I shouldn’t have put myself in a position to see it.

Never, ever do what I did. If you knew someone attractive when you were young, do not look that person up on Facebook if you are over 40. You will regret it. The girls I went to high school with look so bad, it depresses me. I feel young most of the time, but when I looked at those women, I felt like I was about to roll into the casket.

One of them was very, very thin, and she had a large number of mysterious dark spots on her skin. I don’t know if she was a cancer survivor or what. She was a great-looking girl way back when. She used to flirt with me, but I didn’t know what to do with her. I liked her a lot. It’s terrible to see what the years have done.

I also looked at my class’s sex symbol. I don’t know what else to call her. She was a cheerleader. There were all sorts of rumors. On Fridays, seniors were allowed to dress casually instead of wearing uniforms, and I remember her showing up in what was essentially lingerie. I was not very mature, but even then, it struck me as creepy. It seemed like she had given up on respect.

She was a very intimidating girl, but now…oh, boy. Maybe fifty pounds overweight. Lots of features that seemed cute when she was young, stretched and exaggerated into major flaws. She should have posed in a T-shirt that said “Steve’s Mortality.”

I saw some photos of men I went to school with. I was surprised how many had captions indicating they were doctors. You have to understand, I knew these guys before they got their MD’s, and they were not particularly bright. In fact, I know quite a few people who were not bright teenagers, yet who somehow became physicians. It’s eye-opening.

If you’re not terribly smart when you’re 16, you’re not going to be terribly smart when you’re 50.

When I was in high school and college, I thought of doctors as very smart people. In college at Columbia, I was a pre-med, and I was intimidated. I was deluded. Doctors have to be significantly smarter than random people off the street, but to be quite honest, most are not on my level. When I was a physics T.A., I ended up teaching future doctors who were the cream of the undergrad crop, and only one came close to impressing me.

I sold myself short when I was young, but that makes sense, because at home, I was regularly made to feel that I would never succeed at anything.

I can’t help feeling somewhat embarrassed when I look at old acquaintances on Facebook. Many of them did very well with the mental equipment they were given. I did not. I had all sorts of academic problems the first time I went to college, and I didn’t go back until the majority of my high school friends were established in respectable jobs. I did extremely well in physics until I got burned out, and then I quit, which is another embarrassment.

I tell people I “washed out,” but that’s not true. I had some big setbacks because I was on ADD drugs that drove me up the wall, but I worked things out with the department, and I was allowed to enroll for classes. I left so I could try stock trading, which didn’t work out. Then I hit rock bottom and went to law school.

I put it that way on purpose. For me, law school wasn’t really “rock bottom,” but it was a parachute. My application to law school was an admission of failure. I was looking for something lucrative and less demanding than going back to physics.

A lot of people break their backs trying to get into law school, and when they get there, they’re thrilled and proud. I was ashamed of myself. I went to law school because I had given up on something ten times as challenging.

Law school was easy. That’s why I chose it. I wanted something easy that would guarantee me a paycheck.

Law was not very interesting. It was sufficiently interesting to allow me to work at it without being painfully bored, but it wasn’t physics or math. I don’t think law is for the extremely bright. Once you get past “very bright,” you want a field other than law. I don’t believe the great legal thinkers of history had top-notch minds. The work they did just was not that hard.

Any intelligent person can understand any concept in the law. Not true in math or physics.

When I was in law school, I didn’t meet anyone who seemed truly smart (nor did I read any legal works that seemed to indicate genius). I met people who had a lot on the ball, but compared to the company of physicists, it was Romper Room.

It’s embarrassing to think about these things while looking at my successful classmates, but nonetheless, I have to acknowledge something. Physics would have made me miserable in the end. Physicists tend to end up with stressful jobs, and the work gets very dry up at the high end. Also, you can’t be a physicist and work for yourself. Generally, you have to be an academic, or you end up doing boring work in industry. You may end up testing the tensile strength of garbage can liners every day. Physicists are not valued highly. The pay isn’t great, and you always have to be an obedient herd creature, just like a fungible sociology professor.

Here’s another thing: physicists work with maladjusted people all day. Some physicists are great people, but in my experience, most have serious personality problems. You really don’t want to go to a party thrown by physicists. It would be like a party at a psychiatric facility. “Very good, Achmed. Now you throw the ball to Li Feng.”

They had an orientation get-together when I started grad school. Everyone walked in, stood around nervously, and then left.

I was in grad school for a year and a half, and I didn’t make a single friend. When I was in law school, I made loads of friends. I made friends at both of the churches I attended after law school. I made friends from blogging. I’m eccentric, but I don’t have problems making friends. When I don’t have friends, it usually means I’m rejecting people. Grad school was another story. You just could not connect with these people. Some were snotty. Many were painfully shy. Some were socially infantile. Some had absolutely no personality.

I failed to live my dream, but my dream would have made me more unhappy than law. Go figure.

I felt somewhat envious when I looked at Facebook. That’s normal, of course. I was looking at propaganda. Not many people tell the truth on Facebook. They post photos of their beautiful families on vacation, but they generally don’t write much about their failures. You don’t see them writing about the children who commit suicide, their desperation to get out of sick marriages, or their problems with mental illness.

I used to know a couple who attended a church I belonged to. They both had Facebook accounts. They posted pictures of their smiling kids. The father created a page promoting his architecture and engineering firm. The wife gushed about her blessed family and her wonderful husband. One day a friend of hers was having lunch at my house, and she looked at her phone. The wife had just texted her, telling her her marriage was killing her and that she had to find a way out. Also, the husband never went to college, and his “firm” was him. He had no training in architecture or engineering, and he was working without a license. I would have been terrified to walk inside any structure he built. Sooner or later, he will be charged with a crime. What he’s doing is illegal.

They divorced.

That’s Facebook for you.

Sometimes I wonder if I amounted to anything in this world, but then I have to ask myself: what would I have amounted to had I stayed in law and made a fortune? Even when I was practicing, I knew that what I did was utterly insignificant. “What did you do for humanity?” “I helped community colleges fire instructors they didn’t like.” “I helped a company stop infringement of their patent on a product that stabilizes brick facades.” Wow. The stuff of greatness. Start a Gofundme page and build a statue of me.

What if I had succeeded in physics? I would not have been the next Einstein. I would have done boring experiments and taught repetitious classes to college students. What if I had made it as a pre-med? I could have frozen people’s warts! Okay, let’s shoot higher. I could have performed heart transplants. So what? Lots of people can perform heart transplants. Take one surgeon out of the picture, and another one will take up the slack. Fungible.

Doctors have miserable lives. They suffer like hell until they’re in their thirties, and after that, their lives are not their own. Most of them don’t like their jobs. They kill themselves right and left.

I got three books published. That was a waste. The books were silly and counterproductive. Embarrassing things for a Christian to have on his record. What if I had made it as an author? I would be like Dice Clay or Judd Apatow. The public would be my enablers. They would be paying me to stay immature and to continue disgracing myself. They would be paying me to be a terrible influence on other people; especially younger people considering becoming professional humorists.

I guess that if they could look me up, my classmates would think I was a disturbed fringe nut, but then they are not like me. They are generally liberal. They are suburbanites to the core. They come from families that have zero interest in God.

I sold out to God, so that’s my lot. As a Christian, I’m not supposed to be ambitious. I’m not supposed to strive to get a ski house in Vail and a hospital wing named after me. Those things are for people who ride Satan’s hamster wheel. They spin and spin and go nowhere.

To a Christian, the only permanent gain is helping people survive death. You can do a thousand heart transplants and accomplish nothing if all the recipients go to hell. A Christian can bring people closer to God, and if those people make it, the person who helped them will have them with him forever, in an atmosphere of total love and peace.

I have removed myself from the mainstream. I have not had a distinguished legal career, because I ended it. I chose all this. People will not understand it, but then most people are doomed. I shouldn’t consider their opinions, given the darkness they live in.

In spite of my character problems, I’ve managed to help a few people. It would be nice if God put me in a position to help more. Still, what I have is good enough. It beats having a condo on Maui and having no relationship with the best, most powerful being there is. How many of my high school classmates (I avoid using the term “friends”) know what it is to have Jesus visit them and pour love, peace, and joy over them?

Really, though, don’t look up your high school classmates on Facebook. You will feel like you’re ready for assisted living.