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One of my more inanely fond memories of college was rampaging through facebook at the end of a drunken night, or actually often at the beginning of the night, and maybe on one or two occasions that was the whole night, just vodka and orange juice and a lot of clicking. Actually that never happened, thankfully.

The novelty of this wore off long ago, but this afternoon Rumit, who even though he lives in South Bend, Indiana now still won't leave me the fuck alone (just kidding Rumit), introduced me to Studenvereichins, which is European facebook, whose interface is an exact replica of our own, only with more racism, and tighter pants. Also it's written in German.

For anyone who can stumble blindly through the German language well enough to sign up, I highly recommend it. I have an unusual fascination with visiting and experiencing other schools. There is a unique kind of freedom and unaccountability I'm drawn to, in addition to the curiosity of peering into a world that's very similar to yours, but obviously different down to every person who occupies it.

Euro Facebook, as geographically and socially removed but nevertheless uncannily identical to our version as it is, is therefore a perfect outlet, or at least a perfect 20-minute distraction from job applications. (Sometimes I feel like this entire summer has been a perpetual distraction from job applications, even the going-to-NY-for-interviews part).

So we'll see where the following statement, under "Über sich selbst" (About Me), leads:

So it's like this. I get drunk and wake up and I'm on German facebook. Stuck in the vortex with all its incomprehensible spellings and alien characters like that B-looking thing, that makes me think of chocolate. The only way I can find my way back home to America is through a randomly plotted spasm of anonymous friending - I mean FREUNDing - until by some insidious miracle of 'social networking' I find a connection back home.

It's the ultimate test of whether this kind of technology isolates or unifies us. Now where's my fucking chocolate Germany.

The beauty of it all is that the same annoying social/sexual politics and other bullshit (based on a cursory glance of unknown people and an incomprehensible languag) carries over to the European version, along with all the details that really characterize Facebook. There's the self-conscious self-exhibition (like Phil Braatz here) designed to communicate either 1) one's high-octane party-hopping lifetstyle, 2) one's awe-inducing artsiness, or 3) one's recent trip to some place way cooler than you'll ever go (except on Euro facebook they just take a snapshot in the backyard). (And if you're really a douche you'll put a photo of yourself playing a drum on a Moroccan roof, hitting the trifecta without actually realizing that before writing this.)

Phil Braatz, Uni Konstantz, Germany, international hustla

Not being able to read German (90% of the registered users are apparently German) obviously impedes my ability to peer into this world, but in a way it's more interesting, to see the signs without the language. Back and forth wall postings, with their forced attempts at humor, they're cautious flirting, they're light-hearted inside joke-peddling. I didn't really look but I'm sure there are Gruppen like ours too: "I went to public ecole, PUTE!", "Examen ist fast so schlimm wie GW Bush," some Portuguese kids who hate Uggs and popped collars with the same fervent passion as we once did, and probably a "I'm from Oslo PROPER, not the suburbs!" group or two.

Still, there's something unsettling about this level of voyeurism, to think that some random American several thousand miles away can look so intimately at so many students in their own supposedly private university network. Of course, you only see what they want you to see, but between lists of friends, photo albums, wall postings (somewhere in Berlin or Leipzig or someplace right now there's a German Lynne commanding her boyfriend to schreibe on her Pinnwand....Pinnwand means wall, jerks), one can construct a pretty extensive character sketch of this stranger on the screen, imagined enough to be real. And upon perusing all these lives a feeling came back to me that I once experienced one evening at dusk, lost, for all intents and purposes, at some random technical college tucked away at the end of a bus line in Ostrava, Czech Republic, came back to me, as I stood in a place I would never have heard of much less set foot in if not for an unplanned 6-hour train layover on the way to Krakow, a feeling of distance and lonely curiosity and innocent intrusion, standing outside their dorm, hearing the murmurs of early Friday night escape through every open window, seeing unknown faces and silhouettes of strangers brush by the windows.


It prompts me to wonder (and of course these are unanswerable questions) whether people around the world are fundamentally the same or essentially different, and whether this kind of Internet voyeurism and manic social networking brings those people closer, or divides, compartmentalizes, categorizes, and isolates them.