Saturday Night Worthy

We all have different friends for different types of fun or activities. Some girlfriends are great to share a laugh over the National Inquirer's bathing suit issue. Some girlfriends are great listeners and some give good advice. Some can lament with you about your husband's last annoying argument and others you don't bother to share it with at all. Some are great shopping with because she can go at the same speed or has the same taste as you and enjoys spending hours in the dressing room with you, critiquing each other's outfit.

Each girlfriend serves her purpose as your friend (otherwise, we wouldn't bother with them) and some fulfill more than one need. Usually, the more your friends are "good" for, the better friends with them you become.

But then there's a friendship criteria that seems to rise above the rest. It's the final "test" question of how much you like your girlfriend--is she Saturday Night Worthy (SNW)? Though not many will admit it as readily as I, some of your girlfriends that you love Sunday through Thursday just do not cut it when it comes to girls night out on Saturday. And of course, you can't share with her the fact that you just don't deem her SNW. She may be a quality candidate for a Friday night happy hour or a Sunday afternoon film and lite bite. But SNW has much higher expectations.

But we all have girlfriends not SNW. Maybe it's her two-decades-behind hairstyle or outfit. Perhaps a bit superficial but that is a detractor for a good-looking group of girls looking to cut the rope line at a Saturday Night hotspot. But more importantly, it's probably her too-uptight attitude like when a man checks her out and she runs in the other direction. Most often, especially for the 30 and up crowd, the queen of the NOT SNW girlfriends is the one who corners their other friends in a bar to share a cute story about what their darling little child did on the toilet the other day.

I don't want to hear complaining about "what time are we going to get home" nor "How much did that drink cost?" or "I'm tired. I've got to get up with the kids at 6am." I don't want to go out for a "nice" dinner and have sweet conversations such as"Have you tried the wonderful new lean cuisine?" or "did you see that new time-out trick on SuperNanny last night?"and be home by 9:30. I do that Monday through Friday, thank you.

My point is that for whatever the reason, these girlfriends are best left at home. Maybe I'm just getting old and craggy but my Saturday nights out with my girlfriends are few and far between. They're precious girl-time for me. I don't want to talk about my own kids for a few hours, so you can expect I certainly don't want to talk about yours! I want to get dressed up, feel fabulous and young (ish); kick up my heels and hit the dance floor with my girlfriends. I want gritty girl talk and I want to be completely honest. I just can't do that with girls not SNW.

I want to be me for a few hours. Not a daughter or wife or mother. For a few blissful hours I want to be fun and fancy free Tracy. It's the girls that just don't know how to have fun that are not deemed SNW. We're all happy or happily married. We just want to have fun, let our hair down and party like it's 1999. It's not a big request. It seems rather simple.

However, I found myself getting bogged down, weighted down actually, when I had to drag along a friend-of-a-friend or one of my own not SNW friends on my Saturday night who quite frankly, is a bore. Boring may be too strong a word so perhaps "pleasant" is more succinct. After enough times of having a pleasant time out, I decided to call it quits. I only want to go out with my girlfriends that I've deemed SNW. Everyone else will have to try to book me the other six nights of the week.

Not that there's actually a list of criteria one must pass to be on my SNW "list". It's just one of those known things. I know I'm not the only gal who feels this way either. My friend Julie calls it the "edge factor". She doesn't want to be friends with just "nice." People have to have some "edge" to them. We always laugh that even though we really can't define that word ourselves, we just know it when we see it in someone. It must exist because whenever we've met a new person who had "edge", we both would recognize it immediately. The same can be said about SNW. My friend Andrea gets that too and we're almost always on the same page about it

I'm not saying I'll never do anything with those girls ever on a Saturday night. Of course I will. But when it comes to planning my girls night out, I'm pretty strict on reviewing my SNW list and checking it twice. I know some girls think I'm a bitch about it. Maybe it's not one of my best personality traits but I'm okay with that.

Here I go

So. I've decided I'm kinda "over" Facebook. After connecting with most of my past I've ever cared about...everyone from elementary school to sleepaway camp to my neighbors down the block, what am I going to do on there next?

I didn't have any interest in it until I had to do a ton of research about the Millenial Generation for work....ya know, how to motivate the 20 somethings in today's work environment. Afterwards, I felt old. It pained me that I had to read about this new technology/web thing rather than just be "in the know."

It reminded me too much of when my parents brought home our first microwave in the early 80s (or was it 70s?). They were afraid of it because they didn't know how to use it, so of course, I wasn't allowed to touch it. Even though, I inherently knew to just push the buttons...it frustrated me that my parents could be so out of the loop...So that's where I found myself a few months ago...feeling old and out of the loop.

So I joined Facebook and instantly reconnected with my past. It seems as if everyone my age has been joining the Facebook wave. It's been interesting because I got addicted to it for awhile, as it seems many before me have done as well. My friend Doug and I were talking about it both when we reconnected on Facebook and then again in person at our 20th high school reunion. There seems to be a few phases to facebook. The first is denial. Many people I told about it swear they don't want to go on there. Ever. No time...not interested in finding old friends...they give you 10 reasons why they don't want to join. Then phase two kicks in after receiving sixteen requests to join: okay, I'll give it a shot but only to see who's on here. So people create an account, maybe add a photo and some profile information. That's all they intend to really do.

Next thing you know, phase three, the addiction phase kicks in. The new facebooker finds 65 people he/she forgot mattered in his/her distant past. They start sending shots, plants, Manolo shoes, and such. They become obsessed with movie trivia, music trivia, sending booty slaps and little green men. You can always tell the newbies because in one sitting, they've shared six new applets with their friends. Those in stage three tell everyone they know they must get on Facebook too!

Then finally, after the shiny newness wears off and you've said hello to everyone and their friends and so on and so on...and I'm done. Stage 4: boredom on Facebook.

I started to get so picky with it, I even criticized my friend Andrea for accepting friendship requests from people I know she didn't care about. I called her a Fakebooker. I'm mean. :)
But even if I'm in stage four, I still have to admit I check my status a few times a week. It still is a trip to see people's updates and photos. I love that I can tag friends and then they can see it on their page. I love that everyone I know from one place is some how interconnected with friends I know from somewhere else. It makes life so much easier to upload photos and then share them with everyone.The application is genius. And I now feel a little more "with it."

So does anyone have any idea what's going to be the next big idea? I'd love to know.

First Blog Post

So, here I am....embarking upon my first blog post. I'm a journaler, so I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see how much I enjoy blogging. I fear this may just become "another thing" I have to add to my daily mental to-do list but I'm going to give it a try. So join me on my trip...