January 28, 2009
I was tugged into Facebook kicking and screaming. Literally. My best friend forced me to sit at my computer, create a profile, add a picture (ugh) and do weird things with walls, flair, bumper stickers and status updates. Then came the endless friend requests of people I had no interest in befriending. It led to the ultimate question, again, of who are your real friends. I decided to let most people in. After all, my life is pretty boring. If they want to hear about the latest poopy diaper, how I lost my crappy job, how my sister’s in jail, why my family still rocks, how big the kids are getting, how I love my husband more than ever before, how there are no jobs in Jacksonville, how I got a freelancing job writing ecards but lost it because I was running my sister’s monogramming business during Christmas… oh wait. I don’t put that stuff on Facebook. I keep it light. I like it light. This is the place for the heavier stuff. The deeper thinking. Or the latest midnight life crisis.
Argh. I buried the lead. The lead was supposed to say that Facebook rocks. Push aside all the cheesy gimmicky stuff, the time-wasting stuff like flair corkboards, and silent e-stalking. Look instead at the amazing ability to use this huge network to find people who (for whatever reason) drifted away, unnoticed, as you lived your life. And suddenly, one day, it occurs to you to check to see if your college roommate is on. She is! She’s… in Australia? How would you have ever found her otherwise? And then other possibilities arise — could that dear friend from Germany possibly be there… she is! And she missed you, too. What about those other friends who really weren’t that far away… but… but…
And somehow, through all the stupid status updates and the people you don’t really care about blabbering on about how their lives rock or suck or whatever… you realize that there is something to this social networking thing. It’s brought me closer to some very dear friends. And it afforded me hours and hours of useless entertainment at my crappy, boring job. Which I no longer have. And that’s okay, too.
So here’s a shout out for Facebook. Thank you to all the computer geeks who figured out where my friends were.
~~Peace~~ linden
