Facebook came into my life in the 11th grade. This was the year 2006 – tumultuous times, to say the least. George W. Bush was in office, the Iraq War was in full swing, and I was madly in love with a girl named Emma Steiner (not her real name).

In those days a good portion of my extracurricular time was spent hooking up with Emma Steiner in the backseat of my black ’05 Corolla (at the time the backseat Corolla hookup was my go-to move with the ladies). Now Emma Steiner had an older sister who attended Oberlin College, and who Emma tried to emulate in every way possible. She cut her hair like her sister, she listened to the same music as her sister did (jam bands, ugh), she dabbled in coke like her sister did (that was years later at Vassar), and as soon as Facebook allowed high schoolers to sign up, Emma Steiner went and got herself a Facebook just like her sister did. One day after a particularly intense, yet all together frustrating make out session, Emma and I sat on the faux leather backseat of my Corolla, hands held, the “Garden State” soundtrack pumping through my Toyota’s Japanese-made speakers, when Emma said frankly, “Isaac, you need to get a Facebook.” I’d never heard of Facebook and so my response was a very typical and admittedly puerile, “Facebook? That sounds gay.”

Emma explained to me how Facebook was this new cool thing, “like Myspace only better” and that it was made for college kids and her sister had one, and Ashley Olson had one. And did you know her sister partied with Ashley Olson in the city? And would you ever try coke? And blah, blah, blah until by the end of the afternoon I found myself on the couch in the living room of her dad’s house signing up for Facebook on her new MacBook, which she explained she’d gotten as a gift a few months earlier on the occasion of her younger sister’s Bat Mitzvah, although nowhere in the Jewish canon does it make mention of receiving a gift on the occasion of a sibling’s Bat Mitzvah. Nonetheless, there I was navigating Facebook, still dismissing it out loud as “gay,” though deep down inside admiring its sleek blue and white interface. It was so clean, so sterile, nothing like Myspace, that jungle of messy URLs and bulletins adorned with Bright Eyes lyrics and desperate pleas to “cOmMeNt oN mY PiCz.” No, Facebook was a very different social networking experience. I was hooked.

Two weeks before summer Emma broke up with me over AIM for a guy named Hunter (his real name) who smoked clove cigarettes and wrote folk songs on his accordion protesting the Iraq War. I was crushed.

That summer, my family rented a house on a beach in Israel. While my siblings and cousins played outside in the sands of Netanya, basking in the same sun our ancestors basked in 2,000 years earlier, I spent the days walled up in an upstairs bedroom plugged into the DSL line, crazily skimming through Emma’s posted photo albums. Most of them were pictures of her and her friends, her and her sisters. But every so often I’d come across a picture of her and that Hunter smoking cloves on the pier or driving around the city in his black on black Audi. The image of the two of them making out in the backseat of his fine German automobile with some anti-war hippie nonsense pumping through the Audi’s no doubt superior sound system would pop into my mind, boiling my blood and slowly chipping away at my already broken heart.

Senior year of high school, they found Saddam Hussein buried in a hole and hung him. I watched this on a YouTube link someone posted to my Facebook wall. Around that same time I got over Emma Steiner. I’d still venture onto her Facebook once and while and look at her pictures. Before graduation, Hunter almost died in a car accident speeding down Highland in his Audi. I found this out through Facebook as well. When someone invited me to join the Facebook group “Pray for Hunter” I accepted and even commented on a link of one of his accordion songs somebody posted to the group’s wall. I posted, “Feel better, man!” and at that moment I forgave him for stealing the girl I’d loved.

Much has changed since then. I wrote all this from a Pub in Dublin, where patrons were seated with their eyes glued to a television overhead. CNN was reporting that tomorrow morning in Cairo 1,000,000 people would take to the streets fueled in no small part by Facebook. Governments from Tunis to Cairo are being overthrown, and all I can think about is that one afternoon junior year when Emma Steiner had me sign up for Facebook on the couch in her dad’s living room, saying almost prophetically, “It’s like Myspace, only better.” Only better indeed.

Isaac Himmelman is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].