When you get onto Facebook, you get a choice of completely useless “Applications” that you can add to make the experience more fun.  In turn, your email gets flooded with things you never wish to really have.

“Your friend that you have not seen in ten years has sent you a growing egg that you don’t wish to put into you profile.”

“A friend of a friend has just turned you into a vampire.  Bite him back chump.” Because being called a “Chump” in an email is endearing.

“A really good friend just threw a sheep at you.” You really don’t know how to respond to this.  Should you throw a sheep back?  Should you send them a growing egg?  Should you become a superhero and smother them with your hair ability?

Pretty soon you're consumed with the need to one-up your clique of friends.  Or if you have the Entourage Application?  Your “Entourage of Friends.”

As amusing as this can be, it can be terribly annoying.  And you really have to pick and choose these applications, or else you are doomed to throwing sheep, sending virtual beers and creating bad art on your “Super Fun Wall.”

Or worse.  I accidentally chose the application “Meet New People.” The worst decision for an application I have made in a very long time.

From what I gathered from the promotion for this application, you could meet “Like Minded People.” As someone who is on Facebook to meet improvisers and other theater and comedy minded individuals, I thought this would be a great tool along with I-Promote.

Oh god, no.  I have been inundated with “Someone is FLIRTING with you” emails.

I never considered myself an attractive woman.  When I tell people this, they laugh and say, Oh, you know you're good-looking, Shaun" -- at least, if they're white men they do.  To them, I'm "Exotic."  I’m “Big Boned.” They love the “High Cheek Bones,” or “You look like you should be drawn on the Good Times Picture.”

And it seems this is the same sort of person who wishes to “Flirt with me” online.

My real-life relationships seem to surprisingly coincide with my Online Life.  Every single person who has “Flirted with me” is white.  They are generally short.  They are generally dark-haired and mustached.  Nine out of ten times they are wearing a beater shirt.  They all seem to reside either in the south or the more “eccentric” parts of the country.  There are a lot of cowboy hats.  You can almost smell the German Shepherd.  They are paunchy.  Sickly.  Budweiser flu.  Jack Daniels cancer.  I don’t get the guy from Yale.  Or even the brother from Brown University.  I don’t get Obama.  It seems the ones who are attracted to me the most took two years at DeVry before they started to work at the dog food factory, and have a restraining order against them.

They wish for me to cook pie.  Grits preferred.  They can’t get Iman.  They can’t get Halle Berry.  I’m your substitute.

I should have deleted this application about a month ago.  But out of all the sheep throwing, and vampire biting, and RSS feeds on what other people are doing or updating pops into my email, there is something strange and satisfying about seeing “Someone is FLIRTING with you.”

And to confirm over and over again who is interested in me.  I still got it.  With the Jeff Foxworthy Crowd.

Some guy actually wrote in his flirt to me “You are the person I would not mind showering with gifts.”

The picture showed him in a dingy apartment with a filthy looking couch, that I am almost certain my theater company used as a prop in 1982.

Maybe he just wanted to re-unite me with the couch. Figuratively and literally.

 It’s like a train wreck in your email.  You can’t turn away.  It’s a dangerous virtual world for a black woman who knows who is going to flirt with her before she even clicks back onto Facebook.