Would you accept The Sheet from him?

When I was fourteen I made a sheet of what I considered vital statistics: musical tastes and books I liked, who my close friends were in the local high schools if someone might want to check my references, along with my phone number and email address (I wasn't a savage). I kept it to one page, single spaced, single sided, no fewer than six clashing fonts. I always carried a few folded-up copies with me and would hand them out when I was having a conversation I wanted to continue or begin. Whenever I ran out of The Sheet, I would update it and print ten fresh copies.

For a year, I did not speak to Melissa. I felt she had betrayed me by fooling around with a girl I had kissed moments before leaving her home. Melissa would track me with The Sheet, because I was a topic of conversation for those affronted or intrigued by a strange boy. Melissa had a dozen that she had taken from people at her school, with whom I had flirted at a concert or in the mall. (There was a reason I seemed always to have a girlfriend: charm and brute-forcing it.)

One person derided that this was my dating resume. They didn't have it in them to do this to my face. They were not wrong. It was as though I were applying for the position of best friend or boyfriend that they didn't realize they had open.

I could notate which girls I dated had kissed me as the result of The Sheet, even once removed. (One girl with whom I shared affection did so because I had given The Sheet to her friend, who had not gotten around to calling.)

Nowadays, people add new contacts to one form of social media or other. Everyone is forced to maintain the performance of their life. The Sheet would make no sense. It would be too antiquated to even be comprehensible.

I have two websites, but neither of them is going to give the neat summation The Sheet did. No one wants to get to know me when I hand them my business card. (I have given eight hundred out since. I doubt they have ever resulted in a new friend or fan.) It isn't merely that I am older and what boiled down to an analogue MySpace page would come off as unforgivably peculiar now, especially from a man in his late thirties. It is a different paradigm. No one is out to connect without thorough vetting.

When what I was doing was rare and strange, a response to it meant something. It was a choice to connect rather than following through on low stakes etiquette. I had given those people -- let us be honest, mostly girls -- a deeper glimpse into the version of myself I wanted to show. That alone seemed worth checking out. No one else took this tack, even if it might have been an awkward one from a less outgoing boy.

I was a trendsetter, only I didn't mean to be. I wanted to connect and already understood this was going to get harder as technology progressed. Now, when you want to know about someone, you google stalk them. There are, depending on the day, between 35,000 and 60,000 results for my name, as people like to quote me. I do not think anyone much is trying to google me. There is such a glut of information that it would be hard to get a handle on me anymore. There is not the purity of a sheet of paper listing the concerts I loved.

I don't know how I would process being fourteen years old now, though I conveniently will not have to live this. It is all hypotheticals. I don't know that I would like it. Part of the reason I enjoyed my teen years was that I didn't have to be settled into the person I would be. If I changed up The Sheet, that was who I was now. I could be new. I could vary. Now, a kid who snogs a girl at a concert has the information blasted to everyone from his ex to his piano teacher. There is no privacy to interaction and a constant fight against calcifying in place.

I can't fathom the degree of nakedness kids must feel. Nothing is theirs alone. There is no chance to have a new face, to try a new thing without being recorded. There is no way to make a mistake and have it be forgotten. (I say this as a man who has written millions of words of my thoughts and interactions online for so long that my first entry could now vote. Still, I am recording what I choose to show. One has to choose to read this. It isn't going to show up on your status feed. My entries tend to be a bit too long to read without intending.)

In college, a friend blew up at me that I had fooled around with his girlfriend. I immediately responded that I hadn't. Then I looked to her for confirmation and she said I had, three years prior. I assured him that this didn't make me a threat to him, but the point was that I got to have that embarrassment. I did not have to feel I needed to tweet out the breakup and what came before. On This Day didn't remind me of the anniversary of sticking my hand down her pants. There was little evidence of our brief dalliance than what we remembered, and even less so that in my case.

Kids aren't going to have more privacy. Even if they delete all their accounts - and why would they when social media makes up most of the way people are social at all anymore? - their friends won't. Facebook makes profiles for people who don't have them, a fact which is not a secret. If you never had a profile, your friends still take pictures. If you have ever been at a party or your friends discussed you Facebook, you have a shadow profile waiting for you, data social media robots have assembled to approximate you. You cannot avoid the surveillance state because it looks like your mom's friend from book club.

The people who thought they were clever going to Melissa with information about me today could make a group and cyberbully me into submission (which only would have resulted in my hating Melissa longer or forever). I dated a girl, Alison, who quipped that she was going to start a club for my exes. If our relationship took place now, she could have with a few clicks, though I don't know how many would have joined. (Alison refuses all social media, which means that my only contact with her was sending an email last year that she responded to tersely. As I was not a part of the life she leads now, she doesn't have to concern herself with phatic birthday wishes and hearts on my status updates. It is an admirable restraint on her part, but I will never know her now.)

I want people to be able to be new, but I also google when I want to know more. Once I befriended Amber, I skimmed through her pictures and likes so I could have a better handle on her, rather than pulling these out of her on our first date. Everyone must be stripped by default, and those who are not are outcasts. All we have of our own is what we haven't bothered mentioning online, and it is only ours until someone else messages their friend our secrets.

I complain that I do not have tangible mementos of crucial moments in my adolescence. I lost much because I didn't know I would want it recorded in more than memory or assumed that was at least as good as carving something in stone. I would want it as mine. I wouldn't want some social media amalgam, something curated and edited. Whatever experiences I had then, no matter how awkward these were, they were not for the performance of a permanent record. I could fall for someone and leave them over the course of a month without it being an audition for a callout vlog.

Things aren't going to change enough that some younger model could resort to handing out printouts. Kids don't know differently, as I did not know what it was to flirt without an email address and AIM. Today's teens will decry in twenty years how the late 2010 were halcyon days, though I cannot envision what kids in almost 2040 are doing to make them nostalgic.

Soon in Xenology: Writing. The End of the World. Soulmates.

last watched: The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
reading: Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates