Playground activities always seemed to come in waves. We would find or discover or invent or settle on some game to play and play it every day until we found some other way to spend that most precious half hour of the school day. I suppose when we were very young, the games were no more complicated than running around, which gradually involved into more complex versions of tag. There were the games we made up, with elaborate rules that nobody knew and kids invented and broke to suit their own purposes. Sometimes we would play the sports that were in season. Sometimes we just beat each other up. There was also the phase when we went behind the toolshed and stood against the wall and took turns pushing on each other's chests until we passed out. It was a thrill, but a terrifying one. It seemed that most of us didn't really want to do it. Rather we did it because we felt we had to. So it wasn't all fun and games on the playground. Most of the time, it seems that we were too busy trying to prove ourselves.

I remember very distinctly when soccer was the game of the season. It must have been either fifth or sixth grade because Jeff Brigstock had moved to town and everybody wanted to be on his team. He was the best soccer player anybody had ever seen and everybody liked him. The girls thought he was cute. It was really the first time I ever had a sense of anyone being "popular." Whosever team he was on won, so each day there were more people on his team than on the other. For some reason, we didn't employ the team-picking ritual so often depicted on television. By the end there were at least twenty people on one team and only four of us on the other. That's right--I was on the losers' team. I didn't really think of myself that way at the time, though. Jeff Brigstock liked me. I would like to think that he respected me for being willing to play on the other team. Of course I would also like to think that the schoolyard soccer season of 1984 ended with all of the other people on the playground joining my team in a Revenge of the Nerds style climax, but I don't think it happened that way.

From that point on I became acutely aware of the concept of popularity, that some boys got more Valentines on their desk than others. It came to a crisis in sixth grade, when Robyn Roadarmel didn't invite me to her graduation party. I suppose a sixth grade graduation party is a pretty pathetic thing to get upset about, but my friends had all been invited, and I hadn't. My friends actually petitioned to Robyn on my behalf, but, knowing what I know now, I wish they hadn't bothered, as the night ended after the girls refused to kiss me during a game of spin the bottle.

That isn't even my worst story of rejection. There was also the first dance in junior high when my every request for those horrible slow dances was rejected. I can't really blame the ones after the first few, though, as I can't imagine being asked to dance by a gawky kid who was already blustering with tears would appeal to anyone. Heather Duddy finally granted me a pity dance, which I would thank her for if I ever saw her again. I would also apologize because--since she was about a foot taller than I or any of the boys in seventh grade--I'm sure I left a puddle of tears and snot on her dress.

That isn't the worst story either. I can't tell that one. What it all comes down to, though, is that I have learned to handle the rejection of the masses much more than I have rejection by individuals. It would seem that there is no difference, but there is. Groups are stupid and their taste is horrible, so the thought of being popular never meant that much to me after my dance with Heather Duddy. As long as I had any friends at all I didn't care about being liked. After all, the coolest kids were always the ones who didn't care about what people thought. And this was easy enough to do when popularity was based on the number of anonymous Valentines you got. The thought of an individual person, on the other hand, sizing you up and deciding that you are not worthy of friendship--that is a pain I don't think any of us ever outgrow.

Myspace isn't much more than a playground, and its competitions for the highest number of friends or top placement in people's Top 8s is the same sad old popularity contest. I'm sure we all get requests from strangers for friendship who are looking for nothing more than a notch on their profiles. That is if they aren't promoting their bands or their webcams. It's all rather absurd.

I can understand people's impulse to limit the number of friends they have on this site. The way that friends are arranged here--by the date they created their account--makes it rather hard to find people after a certain point--especially with people's propensity to change their names and photos every other day. I realized recently that a couple of my former students had deleted me from their friends lists. I like having students in my list because it's a two-year school with its accompanying high turnover rate, so this site is a good way to keep in touch with students when they inevitably move on. I tried adding them again, but I was rejected on two of three occasions. And the truth is that it really bothered me, despite the fact that being rejected for a myspace friend request from a former student is something I should be even more embarrassed to admit than the Heather Duddy Fiasco or the Spin the Bottle Affair. It's probably weird being friends with students in the first place. What can I do? I am a friendly person by nature, even if I pretend not to care about being popular. I don't care about being popular. I just care about being loved.

My parents tell me that I would disappear from the table at restaurants. When they didn't find me at the cigarette machine, picking the brand I was going to smoke (Lucky Strikes, which had the coolest packaging), I was at a table of strangers, making friends. In the first case, I suppose my destiny was sealed at an early age, but I don't think I am nearly as outgoing as I was when I was a boy on the prowl at the Bob Evans restaurant. I live in a city where I don't know anybody, a cold city in more ways then one, where most people have their tight little networks of friends well established and aren't interested in adding more, a city where I barely spend any time anyway. I spend all of my time in school, where the students are closer to my age than most of the faculty, students who won't even be my myspace friends unless their grades depend on it.

I will be anyone's friend, unless they cross me. I'm a good friend too, though I am not the best at correspondence sometimes. I respond to guilt though, so a little persistance and a little goading usually does the trick. I may not respond to every email and comment, but consider this an open letter to all my friends--past, present, and future. Any takers? Come on, I only need a few more to make it to 300.

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