Facebook's Weighty Appeal

It seems to me that the main point of Facebook is to see how fat everyone has gotten. I originally joined because my mom sent me a request be her Facebook Friend. I found out later that she had accidentally sent Friend requests to everyone in her e-mail address book, including her congressman and the tech support guy at Dell. In any case, I could hardly say no to my mom so I created an account. Almost immediately I got Friend requests from several members of my family, followed by requests from some of their Friends and so on. People I haven't seen in decades were asking to be my Friend. Why? Some of these were people I wasn't especially good friends with in the real world. Which brings me to my original point: Facebook, at least as far as adults are concerned, is primarily a way to see how fat the people you knew in high school and college have gotten, without revealing your own expanded waistline. That's why most people upload lots of photos of their kids and pets to their profile, but very few of themselves, and especially no full body shots revealing the extent of what twenty years with a slowing metabolism has done to them.

Someone needs to build a Facebook application where you can just let everyone know how much weight you've gained (or lost...yeah, whatever) since you knew them. You would enter what your weight was for various years, and when you get new Friends you can specify the years you knew them and it would automatically let them know that "Evan has gained 197 pounds since you knew him in fifth grade." Maybe it could soften the blow by including, "He's also a couple of feet taller so that helps make up the difference." Of course, for people you knew later on you won't have the benefit of significant height increase to account for the excess weight. "Evan has gained 84 pounds since you knew him in high school. He hasn't grown any taller so that's pretty much all fat. Click here to send him a subscription to Tub Of Goo magazine as a hint that he needs to lose some of that."

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to upload a few more photos of my kids to my profile.