Social Networking...or...How I Found 400 Old Friends, a Few Hundred New Ones, and One New Best One

Last year some time early spring-ish, my dear hubby Brian was telling me all about Facebook. Now, certainly I had heard of it. All the cool kids were on it. But I am not cool. "I'm too old!" I told him. He informed me that many of his peers were on it from high school and they are only a few years younger than me (yeah....I'm a cougar...grrrrrrr). He convinced me and I signed up. Yikes. Addictive that Facebook is. No sooner had I gotten started than I was playing Scrabble until 2am with complete strangers, and taking all sorts of quizzes, and spouting off song lyrics like nobodies business.

But beyond that I found so many old friends who I had long ago lost touch with!

You see, I am an Air Force brat as well as the only child of wonderful mom who was divorced twice before I graduated high school. These are not meant as judgemental statements - they are merely facts. But the clearest memories I have come from the years that started in 6th grade when we moved to Kings Mills (a suburb of Cincinnati). From there, she divorced (this was the 2nd divorce), joined the Air Force and we moved to Ocean Springs, Mississippi. I went on to Mobile, Alabama where I graduated from the University of South Alabama (Go Jags!) and hung out there until 1996 when I moved back up to Ohio, landing in Columbus. So those years can be grouped as such: Kings Mills, Ocean Springs, Mobile, and now.

Up until now, I had completely fallen out of touch with the other three groups. Whether it was through my own nomadic habits of moving on and hating good-byes, built from years of Air Force moves; or whether I left some bad business here and there...the memories were all I had of those times. Sad, eh? Completely my fault. I had tried to track some people down here and there and connected with a few.

But Facebook was like connecting on crack! I could see photos, chat, keep up with daily minutiae, go beyond the general catching up and almost bond again! I reconnected with people I had not talked to in decades (By the way, can I just lament how hard it is to think in terms of decades? It truly sucks!) Soon I was FB'ing like a pro! Brian connected me with other friends and I even connected with some of his friends and some "friends of friends." And that is how I met Alison Lukan - whom I consider a new best friend. Well, not how I met her...I knew her already. But we FB friended and started chatting and it went downhill from there - a whole 'nother post for another day because she deserves a post solely unto herself.

The other day I was stunned and incredibly touched to stop by a friend's FB page to see her father had passed and 45 people had given their sympathy in a mere few hours. And this is not to say that anyone is shirking their duties to attend a funeral or extend a sympathy call to her...but merely to let her know they were thinking of her as soon as she got a chance to check. What a hug that must have felt like.

And then I discovered Twitter. Holy 140 characters of pure sweetness and brevity! It's a multi-taskers dream come true! I am constantly amazed at the new tweople who follow me or interact with me! I am also constantly amazed at the brilliance, sympathy, and sadness that is out there. It is an amazing dose of reality. But just a teaspoon at a time.

There are several other networks out there and I have yet to explore them. I'm sort of waiting to see what will be the real wave. I am totally willing to ride it. I see the beach and it's brilliant white sand and I get the complet picture of this island of social networking and what it has to offer.