booking face

as i mentioned last week, i had a moment of weakness: when my best friend back home made good on her promise to get me to join facebook and sent me an actual facebook invitation, and all i had to do was click a link, i finally gave into years of nagging peer pressure and joined - which, as those loyal to the blog would know, is basically like saying i just became a business major, or purposefully killed a small animal with my foot. it just doesn't make any ontological sense. i mean, i hate facebook.

but lo, i'm one week in and i'm enjoying this. not the whole "collect as many friends as possible" thing (i only friend ppl i'm actually friends with. except this one guy. he was so creepy i was afraid not to friend him. does that make sense?) and i don't much care for the whole "create a fancy profile" aspect (i figure i spent 2+ years generating a pretty detailed virtual and actual persona, which realistically speaking, if these ppl are my friends, they should be familiar enough with. spare the interweb the redundancy, you know?

no, what i'm really enjoying is getting to see other ppl's virtual personalities. there are many ppl i'm facebook friends with now who are totally different via this medium than they are in person. example: i have one facebook friend who i haven't really talked to a whole ton in person, and i always felt like she didn't even like me. but now that we're facebook friends, we've been writing each other basically twice every day, talking about some pretty personal things, and it's crazy, because we hadn't really talked longer than 10 or 15 minutes before!

it's amazing how "wall" posts/ shout-outs take on a different form of (in)formality just b/c of the nature of this virtual space. i guess what i'm saying is that facebook is actually enhancing my relationships with (some) people. (i've noticed that those i'm already really close to, both emotionally and physically close to, are the least interesting - and least interested - to interact with. which is hardly a complaint but more a sigh of relief.)

see what i mean by "enhanced": i had a good friend in middle school who moved to Michigan. we were best friends, but back then no one our age (11-12 years old) had a cell phone, and hardly anyone used anything but dial-up for their internet, so email was unheard of. i still remember writing weekly letters and sending gifts and christmas presents thru the post for about a year before we lost track of each other. gasp and a half, right? (amazing how a young'n like me can assume the "when i was your age..." tone when it comes to technological changes - tech is speeding up our aging! we are quickly becoming outdated! ironic considering the transhumanist view that tech could potentially prevent or delay dying...)

anyway, so i figured if i'm going to be a part of this madness, i might as well try to take advantage of it. test out the tech capabilities, you know? and wow, i realized i could track down all these old friends from middle and high school, all i had to do was remember their names! and suddenly, i found myself retracing and rekindling friendships i'd accumulated over the last 10-12 years! CRAZY, right??! yes, yes it is.

and you know what's even more insane?! i found out that almost everyone is hitching their wagon to the marry train. whoa, when/how/why did this happen? everyone's getting hitched! and it makes me kinda sad, not b/c i'm not even close myself (ha, that's hardly my concern, since i don't envision myself getting married any time soon... or ever?) but because it's so hard, when you haven't seen a childhood friend for so long, to be so excited to find them again and realize, very quickly, that you're not kids any more. nothing hurts the same.

i mean, imagine my surprise to find that my best friend in middle school - who i sat in the back of the bus with and talked about boys with and whose house i went to after school to work on science projects and practice violin duets and watch Star Trek and drink juice boxes with - now has a husband! and, knowing i wasn't there to meet him and watch their relationship grow, that i won't be at the wedding, well, that hurts too. (on a positive note: facebook enabled us to get in touch and catch each other up on the last 10-11 years of our lives! that was pretty amazing.)

it feels like a time warp in here. the past and present are meeting themselves much too quickly, and i feel shrink-wrapped.

-stephanie