An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg

Dear Mark,

We remember a time when facebook membership really meant something. Like you had a four-digit SAT score, or like you had an SAT score at all. First you added WashU, Emory and Tufts, and that was a hard enough pill to swallow. We even got over Hofstra and grudgingly began accepting friendships from kids at Rider. But last week, when we each accepted friendships from girls born after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we got angry. Really angry.

Suddenly, we had to begin removing tags from photos of us drinking, erasing wall postings referring to awkward hookups and getting rid of anything else that might negatively influence younger siblings or get back to once-adoring high school teachers. But even beyond that, there's just something about high school facebook that feels wrong. It is annoying. It is embarrassing. And it forces us to ask: is nothing sacred anymore, Mark?

First, high school students make college freshmen look like amateurs when it comes to excessive grouping. When your number of facebook groups exceeds the number of friends you have at your own high school, it's time to call it quits. Perhaps the only good thing to come out of high school facebook was the group "Hester Prynne Should Rot in Hell," because, really, how much of a whore was she?

But Mark, it's not just the groups that are killing us. If we really wanted to, we could steer clear of the groups by just avoiding the high school profiles. But we can't ignore it when they post on our walls. And my god, do they post. Unfortunately, they don't understand that by posting "OMG how are you? I haven't seen you since our Model UN trip three years ago!" they are undermining the college personas that we have so carefully constructed over the past there years. And when a 16-year-old girl pokes us, we worry that poking back could result in a cyber-statutory rape conviction. Something tells us that when having sex with one of your facebook friends could result in a criminal violation, things have gone too far.

And we're not the only ones concerned about liability, Mark. In fact, if we were you, we'd have our lawyers working pretty hard to make sure our terms of service would cover us if anything happened to one of the sweet Lolitas signed up on hs.facebook.com. The high school facebook is the best thing to happen to sexual predators since lollipops and roofies, so when the lawsuit materializes, don't say we didn't warn you. Just be thankful that high school facebook wasn't around when Natalee Holloway went missing, or we're pretty sure you'd have Greta Van Susteren all over your ass looking for an explanation.

All kidding aside, it's time to get these high school kids off facebook. If we see one more "Mike's Hard" picture, we're going to kill ourselves, and we don't even want to imagine what it's going to be like after the seniors come back from spring break. All we can think of are embarrassing wall posts about Crystal Palace and pictures of braided girls flailing about at the Waterloo. Please don't make us go through this, Mark. We've read enough pre-orchestrated wall postings from heavily made-up prepubescent girls telling each other how gorgeous they are. We've seen too many contrived photos of the popular kids posing proudly with bottles of Bud Light (Labels out, guys! Make sure everyone knows you drank beer!). We don't want to see this.

At least not until they become freshmen in the fall.