The Grapevine Has Gone Digital

Like most people, I grew up with an extended family that had its fair share of dysfunction. We had people we were close to, people we disowned, and people we were close to that we wish we could disown.

All kidding aside, I've always felt lucky to be close to my cousins on one side of my family. Unfortunately the occasional case of sibling rivalry will rear its ugly head. Through most of our adolescent years, my one aunt would compare her daughter and me all the time. While this was a completely one-sided affair (my mom really didn't care), we still got bombarded with news. My cousin developed a chest first, had a boyfriend first, yadda yadda yadda. Meanwhile, I was plodding my way through geekdom, hoping I would "blossom" one day. We always joked that this particular aunt was the family Grapevine. If you wanted to know the news, just call her.

Enter Facebook. Now you can tell the world what you're doing in short little blurbs, or incriminating photos. Said aunt has joined Facebook, and was using everyone's updates to try to "scoop" my mom on the family news. When BigGuy got laid off, he posted it in his Facebook status. A few minutes later, my aunt called my mom to ask her if she knew BigGuy had been laid off. At another point she made up some story about me, using information from several months ago. It was just getting odd.

So at what point do you cut off communication? There are things I want to share with my friends, but I don't want them being used against me. I don't want to feel like I have to censor myself for fear it will work its way back to my mom in some twisted form. I was starting to feel like I was being spied on or something.

Last week someone hacked my Facebook and email accounts. Facebook closed my account until it was taken care of... for about a week. Talk about withdrawals! When it came back up, a few of my friends had disappeared. And I must say I was relieved that my aunt was one of them. Sometimes you just need a little less grapevine.