everyone i know has a myspace page but me (and why i'm okay with that)

I admit, I have a history of jumping on bandwagons. (Mall hair? Check. Radiohead? Check. Baked Potato Chips? Check. Pilates? Check. Reality television? Check. Blog? Check.) I'm the first to admit that if a bunch of people who I like and respect are doing something, I'll probably be doing it too. But, and perhaps it's my age, there is one trend that I can't get behind - MySpace. And please, I really mean no harm or offense to the myriad people who have MySpace pages. Having a MySpace page won't improve or lower your stock in my eyes and I certainly understand why people are signing up for them faster than Dubya can jump to a false conclusion - it's rather nice to be able to type in the name of a long-lost friend or enemy and be able to see what they're up to and it's kind of cool that I can have The Decemberists and Voxtrot listed on my page as being friends of mine. 75 million people currently have MySpace accounts, but for some very good reasons I will never be one of them, and here's why:

1. it makes me feel old, and i'm too young to feel old.
It's no longer surprising to me that teenagers no longer find me cool. I mentioned Pulp Fiction the other day in class and was greeted with blank faces and crickets and, although I think that I'm fairly well in touch with current music, most teenagers think that my taste in music "sucks." After perusing a few dozen of my students' pages and reading their profiles it really hit it home to me that, although I swore at age 16 that I would never lose touch with popular culture, I apparently have. I haven't heard of most of the bands that my kids are listening to, I hate most of the movies they love, and their lingo is often lost on me. Someone pass me another Pabst Blue Ribbon, turn up the Air Supply and hand me my walker.

2. i love my students but please, some distance.
Because I'm old, I only first heard about MySpace last fall when an article about it appeared in the school newspaper where I teach. Apparently, about 85% of the students at my school have MySpace pages and, upon investigating a few of them first-hand, they all make me blush. Everyone's posing provocatively in a bathing suit or talking about how much they drank last weekend and how awesome that was. If it's that easy for me to find them, that means it's that easy for them to find me. I hate running into students at the grocery store and in the underwear section of Target so much that I deliberately bought a house 25 miles away from where I work to avoid intersections between my work self and my home self. I'm paranoid enough that some student or administrator might stubble upon my blog - I don't need to add to the list of things I want to keep out of my professional life.

3. it can only hurt my already tenuous self-esteem.
From what I understand, a person's MySpace profile page is the only part that can be viewed by the public; if someone wants to view your blog he or she has to be accepted as one of your "friends." The number of friends you have is listed on your homepage, and I really don't need my webpage to remind me that I only have five friends. I have my little brother for that.

4. i've managed to get through 28 years of my life without being stalked or sexually molested and i'd like to maintain that winning streak.
'nuff said.

So, even though it might be nice to reconnect with some of my long-lost friends from elementary school, for these reasons this is one woman who you will never be able to network with on MySpace. It's probably for the best; I'd most likely choose Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love is" for the song that gets replayed ad nauseam on my profile page and really, who needs that?