The Oxford dictionary just added a new entry to their big book of words: unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a "friend" on a social networking site such as Facebook.
I'm unfriending Sarah Palin.
I made her my friend in a fit of nostalgia. After becoming reacquainted with the sixth-grade bully who stole my glasses, my high school prom date, and the dude who sold me my first bag of weed, I was feeling wistful.
When I was a kid, I had this friend -- I'll call him Benji Whalen -- whose mom was hot. In fact, Benji's mom was my first mom crush. She was so self-conscious, uptight, and full of prescription meds it was positively freakish. And it turned me on -- in that way only a prepubescent kid hopped up on hormones can be turned on by anything with a pulse.
Benji's mom -- I'll call her Sally Whalen -- always had perfect hair. She was in great shape but never wore anything that revealed more of her body than her toned calves or a hint of cleavage just below the diamond-encrusted crucifix she always wore around her neck.
Even a 12 year old could pick up on her sexual repression. Sally Whalen had repression of Biblical proportions. She was one high ball away from ditching the cross and having an all-night menage a trois with our school's principal and my math teacher (who were both having an affair with each other; everyone knew, but no one said).
Most intoxicating about Sally Whalen was her crazy Prozac stare. Benji would invite me to dinner sometimes, and I'd sit next to Mrs. Whalen.
"How's school, Shawn?"
Sally Whalen didn't give a damn about how school was going for me. Between the prescription meds, the cocktail, and the potent fumes from her hairspray, I was lucky she even knew my name. But she gave me that stare and that crazy Stepford Wife smile that I mistook for seeing into my 12-year-old soul.
Now Sarah Palin's book tour has poured a big glass of cold water on my twisted middle-school fantasy. The whole country is a 12 year old with bad taste in women -- mistaking Palin's spaced-out, pre-scripted platitudes for sincerity and some sort of community college version of domestic policy.
Sarah Palin cares as much about you as Sally Whalen cared about my English class. She's just trying to make it to the next cocktail hour and count the zeros on her book royalty check.
So I'm unfriending Palin and forgetting about Mrs. Whalen, although I may keep following her on Twitter. Her tweets are good for a laugh.