Klout: Just One More Thing to Make You Feel Bad About Your Life

Goodlordalmighty: that's just exactly what we all need, isn't it? Here it is, the Consumer Holiday Season, when we're trying to stay sane and fulfill our myriad Gift-Giving Obligations without either 1) losing our minds at The Mall or 2) going further into debt than we already are or 3) just totally losing it and throwing a left hook to the next chirpy saleswoman who tries to spray us with perfume when we walk into Dillards.

And now we're supposed to worry about our Klout scores.

I hadn't even heard of Klout until a couple weeks ago when I read several mentions in the New York Times. One was about a party/some parties where the only people invited are those with Klout Scores (omigod, I can't even believe I just typed that) over 50.

Is there anybody else out there besides me who's rolling their eyes and then stopping, mid-roll, suddenly panicked, and going, "Holy crap! It's junior high! And it's following me!"

Because it is. I swear. Facebook was college--designed by college kids to appeal to college kids. Twitter was high school, where immediate gossip is the lingua franca, where The Cool Kids' Gossip is repeated ad nauseum and where the number of followers you have determines your own relative coolness.

And now there's Klout, and dang if it's not junior high. But not the fun kind of junior high experience that The EGE had. Oh, no. He liked junior high. He liked elementary school and high school and college. (Heck, he even likes subbing now that he's retired.) Junior high for him was getting to do new stuff and playing football and Little League baseball  and just generally having a great time.

No. Klout is junior high as it was for the rest of us, with The Mean Girls and the acne and the constantly-changing body and the sudden rise and fall of popularity, where everything's in constant flux and you never know who your friends are and even if you have any friends, but you can tell, from day to day, who's popular and who's not. Not that that does you a whole lot of good, since tomorrow it may be someone else who's popular and handing out the invitations to the pool party. All you know for sure is this: it's not you.

That's Klout. Roughly a week after I first heard of it I got a notification that I had a score. And, oh, yeah, I had to go see. I swear, I felt just like someone had slipped me a note inviting me to a slumber party. Really. You know, one of those slumber parties where you really don't want to go because you've been to that neighborhood before, and while there's a lot of excitement all the time, it's kind of skanky in a hot-rod-on-the-front-lawn kind of way, with maybe the dads wearing pants that are a little too tight and the moms starting The Cocktail Hour right after the baby goes down for a nap.

But you know everybody else is going to be there, and you know if you don't go, they're all going to talk about you and by the end of next week, you'll be sitting by yourself in the cafeteria and won't have a ride home from band practice.

So you go. And sure enough, everybody's there. And it's exciting, and you feel like you're in the middle of something important, with everybody sharing phone numbers of cute guys and trading tips about training bras. But then you have to go pee, and when you come out of the bathroom, everybody gets quiet and looks at you, and you blush and duck back in, thinking maybe you've got a brand new zit on your nose. But no. That's not it. There are the same number of zits as there were yesterday, thankyoujesusforsmallfavors.

When you finally go back out, you discover that while you were in the bathroom, everybody else has decided Sally will be the one to ask you to call Tim because your brother is dating his sister, so you're the logical choice. Nobody else had any connections, but everyone wanted to know Tim, oh, yes, indeed. And while you're at it, doesn't your brother know Tod's brother, too? He's one hot 8th-grader, a real hunka-hunka burnin' love, and you should call him up.

Or else. The "or else" isn't stated, but you know that if you don't call up The Cute Guys and do the heavy lifting here, this will be your last slumber party, never mind that the house smells of cigarette smoke and baby spit-up and you suspect their Dachshund peed on your sleeping bag while you were out in the backyard eating a cold hot dog because the host's dad had had too many beers and forgotten to go get charcoal lighter.

Oh, yeah. You either man up and call The Studs or you'll be spending the rest of your junior high life hanging out with the parents and watching Saturday night television. But here's the deal: even if you call them, even if they remember who you are and will talk to you and even--even!--if they talk to the other girls, that sweaty, giggling mass of pubescent angst--it won't mean a thing. Your place in the hive won't be cemented. You won't be suddenly popular. All you'll be is the Girl Who Will Make the Calls. That's it. The popular girls are going to be the popular girls, and the Band Queers are always going to be themselves. All you can do is run alongside and try to keep up by spending your Saturday nights on the phone, trying to get The Cute Guys to talk to your pretend girlfriends so they'll keep inviting you to their parties.

That's the world of Klout. I got a notification from them this morning (how in the world did that happen? I have no idea. Maybe Sally gave them my number), and when I clicked on the link, the pop-up--I swear!--told me, "Oh, no! Your Klout score has dropped one point in the last week!" And then it told me people I should invite to Klout and gave me some buttons so I could tweet and post to Facebook about, um, about--well, I'm not sure. About how my Klout score dropped one point? About how I was going to invite Person X to~~and here I swear to you my fingers froze above the keyboard because I have NO IDEA what I was supposed to invite Person X to do. Be my Klout Friend? Say nice things about me? Ask other people to like me?

Invite me to her slumber party over on that side of town? All of a sudden I feel like I need braces and a Miley Cyrus t-shirt. Oh, yeah: and Clearasil.