Connectivity
Recently, my sister-in-law turned me on to Facebook, a networking site similar to MySpace, I guess, but more grown up. I purposely don’t have a MySpace page. I was wholly against becoming one of those people who feel it is necessary to access a site to maintain or create friendships. I have friends. I made them the old fashioned way. I think I did a pretty good job. Thank you!
So then, you can imagine my pleasant surprise, after forcibly joining the Facebooked world, finding that Facebook has quite the grand following of folks and that, lo and behold, some are people I have lost touch with over the years. And like that old Breck shampoo commercial of the 1970s, Facebook has that connectivity and capability of linking you with people you know and people they know whom you might know, as well. Thus creating a planet all its own where we all know each other in that very real way of Six Degrees of Separation that works every time!
Since my Facebook page creation and initiation, I have come across some old college comrades that all magically disappeared into the development of their lives following attendance at our wedding. It always brings a smile to me when I open my email and see a “friend request” – that’s Facebook lingo for: “Hey, remember me?” – from someone whom I haven’t seen since my college days on the beautifully manicured Queens College campus.
Although it has been a few years, to me it still seems like maybe a couple of weeks ago that we all were hanging around the Student Union invading, by presence or action, its many clubs and organizations. Yet, what I have come to realize is that it’s already been a good 10 years since I left college and {{GASP!}} – a full 20 years since I last saw the brightly colored hallways of Hillcrest High School. Scary! A lot can happen in that time and I am quickly finding out that a lot really has transpired.
Most of my old college gang is ahead of the game, having married long ago, and are in the process of raising two, three and even five kids!! Bless their weary souls! Other ones are late bloomers, not unlike myself, and are only just embarking on new lives joining the ranks of the married and "childrened". It’s funny how things change. It’s funny who remains in your life once the simple times of reckless youth we thought so complicated come to their inevitable end.
Although I do remain somewhat nostalgic for my college years, I am intrigued to learn all I can about the people that were so intertwined in my every-day college life. What did you become? Whom did you marry? Where do you live? How is your mother/father/sister/brother? Oh, and of course, the most important of all of these questions: “Why did we lose touch?”
Oddly enough, many of my friends ended up right where I did – in some part of the Garden State. Others remained in good old Queens. Still others made the seemingly natural and expected transition from one of the five boros of NYC out east to Long Island. Today, we are all somewhere doing something for someone else at points in our lives where we ceased being someone's children and became someone's wife/husband/parent. Some of my old gang is now in such close proximity; it’s by sheer chance that we don’t run into each other somewhere at some point on any given day.
I can’t say for sure what, if anything, will come of these new virtual encounters. For now, it's just been really fun to catch up on each other's lives. To be honest, I don’t see a future where we’re all gathered once again in that old familiar circular fashion on a campus somewhere, or a living room anywhere, reminiscing and chatting up old times. We are all just so busy living, you know. Things like Facebook and the Internet make it all too easy to remain at arm's length, while still being in each other's lives. Increasingly, it seems, there is no time for that kind of real-time, live contact, anyhow. Aren’t you already having trouble keeping up with the people you have kept close to heart? I know I am.
It ends up being a case of: You have whom you chose to remain with in your life. These are the people you see and speak with all the time, if not every day. Those not handpicked to stay in your life just fell through the cracks. Now they reemerge with new lives, situations, names, and places. It’s like opening a book you read years ago, realizing you missed whole parts of it, and it’s a brand new story for you to enjoy!
For what it's worth, there is a lot of interest in the what-ever-became-of scenario to me. I like to know that people I cared for made a decent life for themselves. For now, though, I will remain content to hear from all my past friends through emails and chat-ups on Facebook. I will be okay if I don't hear from them for days, weeks, or months on end because, let’s be honest, I have lived just fine 10+ years without them. That’s not to say that hearing about the milestones in these lives will not affect me in positive or negative ways. After all, we all were there for each other to bear witness in the laying of the foundations of our lives and it’s wonderful to see that the bricks placed so carefully long ago have built beautiful lives well lived to enjoy and admire today.
I guess I am grateful to our grand and yet mysterious information superhighway. I guess I really appreciate the virtues of Facebook, MySpace, texting, IM-ing, and all the other means of communication we've got going on. After all, we could have been born back before we had any of these strong, but invisible threads to each other. Then losing touch would become a very real and sadly permanent situation and I am really not okay with that possibility. I’m going now…I just got another friend request! I am all excited to find out who it is!
So then, you can imagine my pleasant surprise, after forcibly joining the Facebooked world, finding that Facebook has quite the grand following of folks and that, lo and behold, some are people I have lost touch with over the years. And like that old Breck shampoo commercial of the 1970s, Facebook has that connectivity and capability of linking you with people you know and people they know whom you might know, as well. Thus creating a planet all its own where we all know each other in that very real way of Six Degrees of Separation that works every time!
Since my Facebook page creation and initiation, I have come across some old college comrades that all magically disappeared into the development of their lives following attendance at our wedding. It always brings a smile to me when I open my email and see a “friend request” – that’s Facebook lingo for: “Hey, remember me?” – from someone whom I haven’t seen since my college days on the beautifully manicured Queens College campus.
Although it has been a few years, to me it still seems like maybe a couple of weeks ago that we all were hanging around the Student Union invading, by presence or action, its many clubs and organizations. Yet, what I have come to realize is that it’s already been a good 10 years since I left college and {{GASP!}} – a full 20 years since I last saw the brightly colored hallways of Hillcrest High School. Scary! A lot can happen in that time and I am quickly finding out that a lot really has transpired.
Most of my old college gang is ahead of the game, having married long ago, and are in the process of raising two, three and even five kids!! Bless their weary souls! Other ones are late bloomers, not unlike myself, and are only just embarking on new lives joining the ranks of the married and "childrened". It’s funny how things change. It’s funny who remains in your life once the simple times of reckless youth we thought so complicated come to their inevitable end.
Although I do remain somewhat nostalgic for my college years, I am intrigued to learn all I can about the people that were so intertwined in my every-day college life. What did you become? Whom did you marry? Where do you live? How is your mother/father/sister/brother? Oh, and of course, the most important of all of these questions: “Why did we lose touch?”
Oddly enough, many of my friends ended up right where I did – in some part of the Garden State. Others remained in good old Queens. Still others made the seemingly natural and expected transition from one of the five boros of NYC out east to Long Island. Today, we are all somewhere doing something for someone else at points in our lives where we ceased being someone's children and became someone's wife/husband/parent. Some of my old gang is now in such close proximity; it’s by sheer chance that we don’t run into each other somewhere at some point on any given day.
I can’t say for sure what, if anything, will come of these new virtual encounters. For now, it's just been really fun to catch up on each other's lives. To be honest, I don’t see a future where we’re all gathered once again in that old familiar circular fashion on a campus somewhere, or a living room anywhere, reminiscing and chatting up old times. We are all just so busy living, you know. Things like Facebook and the Internet make it all too easy to remain at arm's length, while still being in each other's lives. Increasingly, it seems, there is no time for that kind of real-time, live contact, anyhow. Aren’t you already having trouble keeping up with the people you have kept close to heart? I know I am.
It ends up being a case of: You have whom you chose to remain with in your life. These are the people you see and speak with all the time, if not every day. Those not handpicked to stay in your life just fell through the cracks. Now they reemerge with new lives, situations, names, and places. It’s like opening a book you read years ago, realizing you missed whole parts of it, and it’s a brand new story for you to enjoy!
For what it's worth, there is a lot of interest in the what-ever-became-of scenario to me. I like to know that people I cared for made a decent life for themselves. For now, though, I will remain content to hear from all my past friends through emails and chat-ups on Facebook. I will be okay if I don't hear from them for days, weeks, or months on end because, let’s be honest, I have lived just fine 10+ years without them. That’s not to say that hearing about the milestones in these lives will not affect me in positive or negative ways. After all, we all were there for each other to bear witness in the laying of the foundations of our lives and it’s wonderful to see that the bricks placed so carefully long ago have built beautiful lives well lived to enjoy and admire today.
I guess I am grateful to our grand and yet mysterious information superhighway. I guess I really appreciate the virtues of Facebook, MySpace, texting, IM-ing, and all the other means of communication we've got going on. After all, we could have been born back before we had any of these strong, but invisible threads to each other. Then losing touch would become a very real and sadly permanent situation and I am really not okay with that possibility. I’m going now…I just got another friend request! I am all excited to find out who it is!
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