I'm on Facebook. At first it was a way to keep up with former students and my nieces and nephews, all of whom are in the 20-something range and will converse on FB more readily than via email.

Then, old farts like me started popping up -- friends from grade school on up, old neighbors, etc. That's kind of cool for awhile, but if you haven't talked to someone in 25 years, you run out of things to say fairly quickly. (Plus, I get to feeling bad because almost all of them have ended up with better careers, lives, relationships, etc, than me.)

Then there are the folks you would rather have forgotten. I got an add request from one of those the other day. (Well, it's not her I had the issue with, it was her older brother, who was evil incarnate as a kid.) They lived across the street and up from us.

I added her because there was no reason not to, really -- my grudge isn't with her, it's with her brother (yes, after all these years -- he took one action that traumatized me when we were fairly young kids, and I find those hard to forgive). But man, if I'd never heard those people's name again, I wouldn't have minded.

For you youngsters out there, is there a polite way to decline such invitations? Being old, I'm not always completely up to date on technology protocol.