Since who knows when, I have been called a grandma by friends and parents alike, and with good reason, too. I’m flat out old-fashioned: I loathe TV, do not listen to music (except classical), never go to rallies (or dances, for that matter), and do not have a Facebook account.

Correction: I did not have a Facebook.

I had my reasons for steering clear of Facebook. I don’t take photos. I donít like looking at them, either. I don’t approve of stalking. It’s distracting.

And that shade of blue is so not my color.

That’s why Tuesday, August 30th went down in history as the day that I got a Facebook.

But I was wary. I heard stories  of people who got flooded with friend requests the instant they started on Facebook. I promptly filtered all Facebook emails to the trash. I, who cannot tolerate the Inbox (1) on Gmail, could not have meaningless notifications polluting my inbox.

I braced myself, ready for Facebook to unleash its wrath.

That wrath was about twenty-four hours slow and came as a single friend request from a complete stranger. It was time to take action.

I added a friend who had pestered me to join Facebook. Whereas I had calmly added her, she must have experienced a ìsurge of dopamine because she made a post telling the world that I had a Facebook. And guess what? 28 friend requests followed, along with a zillion notifications.

Facebook seemed to me like Stalker Central, where you can friend anyone and the odds of them friend-ing you are a thousand times more likely than the odds of them friend-ing you in real life. It really depends on what you define a friend as.

Maybe it’s because I truly am a grandma because to me Facebook is, as Shakespeare aptly puts it, much ado about nothing.