I thought I was a pretty updated gal. Truly. Just goes to show how one's reality can be skewed in an embarrassingly gigantic proportion quite akin to the circus mirror that makes you look short and wide like Humpty Dumpty with a bad case of gas. I have an iPhone and I'm not afraid to use it. I keep my calendar on it, my address book on it, my grocery list on it, my notes on it, my pictures on it, my recipes on it, books on it - written and audio, magazines and newspaper on it, songs .....
I have email accounts, several for different purposes, I sync this to that and that to this. I share my synced stuff with other folks so we're all synced up. I can talk on the phone and look up stuff on it at the same time and while I'm doing that I can look something up on the computer and talk to you on the computer too. Send you something on the computer while I'm talking to you on the computer and the phone aaaaaaaaaaaaall at the same ding dang time.
And I can do 5th grade math. While I'm doing all the above.
Sound impressive. . . no. Everybody can do all that stuff all at one time now. Daily grind. Regular bidness. If you can't do all that at one time you can't get through the day these days. Not only can you not get a job, but I'm here to tell ya you can't make it through a PTA meetin', gerl. Most folks try to do all that while they're drivin'. Ok now I'm exaggerating. Ha.
So anyhow, last week I was talking to one of my husband's cousins. There are hundreds of 'em, law me. Oh are you on Facebook? she says, eyes big, tilts her head SSEWWWWWW innocently. Lots of the cousins are; that's how they're keeping up with each other these days. No, I said. It's all I can do to check my email often enough and respond to them all between soccer games blah blah yada you know the rest. Then there are text messages and the twitter doololly.....whew. My seventeen year old niece is texting me every other day, and I'm getting tweets (sounds so dirty, sheesh) here and there from people all over the world telling me all kinds of innocuous, really bland things that folks are doing or thinking or wondering, and what I'm wondering is how much time I've got left before my eleven year old gets interested in all this uber communication and mostly, whatever happened to wonderful, beautiful, contemplation, reflection, being in the moment you're really IN.
So I'm sitting on the soccer field and I get a text from my brother. When I text him back I ask Hey, do you do facebook?
Of course, he says. It's a great way to keep up with what's going on with everybody, especially folks who are far away.
Keeping up with people I love, that can't be a bad thing. So I thought I'd check it out, but it turns out you can't check it out unless you have an account. THE FAMOUS WAY TO GET SUCKED IN TO MOST EVERYTHING IN LIFE. . . the five little words - You Must Be Logged In.
That's how I became a blogger. That's how I got an email account. That's how I became an online banker.
So now I have a facebook page. *_* And it turns out that I only thought I knew what was going on in the world and how connected people were. Right off the bat Facebook asked me if I wanted it to take my email address book and check it for friends. It found that 118 of my contacts had facebook pages. WHO. KNEW. People I go to church with, people I live next door to, people whose kids bully mine, my chiropractor, people I sit next to at committee meetings, scout meetings, go to parties with, people who teach my kids, coach my kids, cut my hair, massage my back, do our portraits, roof my house, work with my husband, sell me stuff, it is pervasive!!!! And within three days, sure 'nuff, Ronny's cousin was right. I have five of his cousins as friends, one aunt, two nephews and a niece. Most of them are people we don't see but once a year at Christmas. So if this is the only way to see them, how glad I am their face has a book too.
