A couple weeks ago, my friend Doug invited me to join MySpace.com. Normally I’d disregard such an invitation because I got my fill of instant messages from creepy strangers in the early days of AOL. But for some reason, Doug sent my invite to an old email address I’d all but forgotten about and I happened to check it and find Doug’s invite the same day Green Day was premiering their “Jesus of Suburbia” video only on MySpace. I figured it must be some sort of sign I was supposed to be a part of the MySpace community and joined.

I thought MySpace was a place to meet and interact with new people. I quickly learned it’s some sort of sick competition to see how many friends you can accumulate on the site. Either people send you an invitation or you send invites out to others and as they accept, they are added to your list of friends. Doug has over 2700 friends. I have one. And it’s out there for the whole world to see: “Jenée has 1 friends.” Yes, it says, “1 friends,” plural, as if the creators of MySpace never considered the possibility a person would only have “1 friend” so they didn’t adapt their HTML accordingly. Under the declaration is Doug’s stupid mug looking like he’s mocking me for accepting his pointless invite in the first place.

I expected my entire MySpace experience to last until the end of the Green Day video at which time I’d never return again, then I noticed Green Day had 42,000 “friends.” I decided as a goof to ask them to be on my friends list. The idea that a grown woman would bother to invite Green Day to be her friends seemed so incredibly geeky, I had to do it. So I sent them the invite and forgot about it.

A week later, I remembered the site and decided to check in again, excited about the prospect it might have the grammatically-correct “Jenée has 2 friends” with a picture of Green Day next to Doug’s. Nope. I still had just “1 friends.” In an even geekier move, I returned to Green Day’s MySpace page and saw that the lackey in charge of maintaining the site had indeed logged on since I sent my invite. What the hell? I checked out the “preferred friends” pictures on their front page. One features a guy bent over a car getting cuffed by a cop. Another picture shows a girl sticking out her tongue with the caption “Blow me you fucks.” They made page one of the friends cut and I couldn’t even make page 400? I considered the possibility the shmuck checked out my page and decided I wasn’t worthy. Maybe it was the fact I hadn’t added a photo or that I listed my age as 100, my sexual orientation as “unsure” and my marital status as “swinger” but since options like those aren’t readily available on most questionnaires, I had to take them.

I browsed some of Green Day’s “friends’” sites to see what they’ve got that I haven’t. Apparently I’m the only one who decided to add ONE famous person/band as a joke. I noticed everybody had scores, if not hundreds, of friends- some famous, some not famous. As far as I can tell, the object of the game seems to be to try and get as many hotties as possible, or at least eight for the preferred friends list. Who are they trying to fool? After browsing the photos and reading some of their comments, it was obvious to me that many of them probably don’t have 20 people who can tolerate them in their real lives yet they’re trying to create the illusion they’re friends with a bunch of Playboy Playmates. Are that many adults really so desperate to convince others they have lots and lots of friends? In Doug’s defense, he is a comic and he was on a tv show so I’m sure most of his “friends” are fans who sent invitations to him. For people in the entertainment industry, it can be another marketing tool, but for almost everybody else, it just seems weird to call someone a friend when their only awareness of your existence is a quick click to accept your invitation.

I decided to send out a few invites to random strangers, same profile intact, to see what would happen. They all accepted. I thought about the possibilities: I could acquire thousands of friends then shove it in Doug’s face, “HA! HA! SUCKER. I WIN!!” But in the end, I decided to delete all my new “friends” from my profile, which I’ll also do if Green Day ever accepts my invite. I’d rather the world know I have one real friend than 500 make-believe ones.