Well, I'm back for more of this stuff. I won't promise (as before) how often or timely my posts will be, but I'm gonna attempt it again.
Happy belated '09. So far, mine is shaping up well. Plans for the wedding proceed apace. Now that we have our reception venue nailed down, the other elements can start to fall into place. (Did I just sound like a bureaucrat? The lack of freshness in the above is disconcerting.) Still to come: the invitations, the food/catering, the logistical challenges ahead. Oh, and I need to pick up my tux soon. But before that, I need to find an appropriate pair of shoes.
I, like many, have now been sucked into the Facebook nation, and it has opened up many cans of worms--mostly positive ones. Last night I hung out with a college roommate I hadn't seen in six years, thanks to FB. I have struck up e-conversations with people I'd long written off or forgotten about, thanks to FB. Thanks to FB, I've found out one good friend from high school and college relocated to NC six years ago after his first wife died. He's since re-engaged.
Does Facebook convince me, a la Faulkner, that the past is never over, that it's not even past? Does it bury me even more in a time I foolishly think was more innocent? Partly yes. But it also lets me see that our lives have second, third, fourth acts, that we aren't buried by the labels we've created for ourselves or others create for us.
One of my favorite things about some novels of the late Carol Shields is how the chapters dip into the great well of time, and you see the arcs of lives in 200-300 pages. In Larry's Party, for example, you just get little slices of the pie, a year here, a year there, but in a sense you see the whole pie too. Facebook's like that. One gets to fill in the gaps. (There's also the vaguely unsettling ability to eavesdrop, which I won't get into here.)
But from what I can tell so far, Facebook is really a social network in the best sense. It's also a scarily easy way to fritter away time.
No comments:
Post a Comment