I’m usually not friends with the kind of people who don’t join Facebook. How am I supposed to shove my utopian life in their face if they can’t see my various albums? How can I make people that called me Bucky Beaver in middle school look at my perfect teeth and beautiful friends, if they refuse to join the social networking site designed to be the virtual equivalent of a daily high school reunion?
That being said, up until this week one of my closest friends, David Bordson-Bozzo was not on the great FB. Bozzo (yes, like the clown, but far more intelligent) has remained in my life, regardless of his lack of FB activity in the past. And now that he has joined the rest of us glorious lemmings I thought I’d support his decision by going through all of my old albums and tagging him in them, so he wouldn’t be marked as a leper for having too few photos. I dedicated myself to tagging him in everything, starting with my most recent albums. I still have to write a newsletter, make three new Facebook albums, and a Groove in the Moo video. And all of those things are sort of overwhelming. Procrastination was necessary. Tagging … tagging I can handle.
But then I realized, if I continue on my tagging frenzy over the next few weeks, his most recent photos would actually be ones from him in college. So, in Facebook world he would be like Benjamin Button — growing backwards.
I was contemplating this conundrum while walking through Hyde Park in the CBD (central business district) of Sydney. Hyde Park has always reminded me of Locust Walk around the holidays, with it’s tree-lined sidewalk, lit up by fairy lights (what Aussies call Christmas lights). It was cold and raining, perfect Philly weather, and I was thinking about Bozzo’s birthday senior year where he dressed up like Flavor Flav. I was walking straight when all of a sudden, I instinctively found myself walking along the circumference of the circle pictured below:
Apologies to my Aussie and American friends who did not attend Penn (not because you didn’t get to have the wonderful Quaker experience, although I apologize for that as well), you will most likely not understand this post. (Ernie, please contain your FOMO.) But to the rest of my collegiate buddies… I think you know why I avoided walking straight through this circle. Yup. The compass.
To all you outsiders: the compass at Penn was situated on Locust Walk, and “legend” was (note: Aussies, I do not mean legend in the way you overuse it to signify an awesome person, I’m using it like “myth”) if you walked over it your freshman year before your first midterm, you would fail. Some socially inadequate human beings, because there were many at Penn, would awkwardly insist on doing this 100% of the time. I, being superstitious — not to be confused with socially inadequate, mind you — would only avoid crossing the compass when sober as a freshman, which was about 40% of the time. (Maybe less, but my parents read this now).
That being said, for some reason I resorted to first semester freshman year tactics while walking through Hyde Park. But, it’s not really a surprise considering the endless amount of parallels I can draw between my time in college and my time in Australia. Shirking all responsibilities and commitments has its perks. Grow up Peter Pan? Not likely.
Top Picture: Bozzo and I in New Orleans. Left Picture: No I have not turned into a slender businessman, this is a photo I stole off the internet since I don't have my camera with me to document the HP circle and needed to get this up soon so I could cross something off my to do list. Even if it wasn't ever on my list, I added it just so I can cross it off.
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