Just A Slice.

I hardly go to Myspace anymore. It wasn’t intentional, I just kinda drifted over to Facebook through a girl I met online. It’s crazy; it feels like after 20 years, I’m backing high school. Only now I have less acne, a better haircut and a then-inconceivable appreciation of Frank Sinatra. And most significantly, I am a lot more experienced with, and a lot less nervous around members of the opposite sex. Through technology, I’m “talking” with people that 10 years ago, outside of a reunion, I would have bet the farm against ever talking to, let alone getting involved with their day to day affairs. Today however, I now know that little Mary Anderson from 6th period English burned her toast this morning and that Bob Johnson from 2nd period Math is getting caffeinated for a long night at work. When you stop and think about it, a lot of us are coming full circle. I know that we’re in the minority, those of us in our late 30’s, early 40’s and beyond when it comes to the population that makes up Facebook, but I also think those of us in that age category are the ones who appreciate it the most. There are a number of reasons for this, the first simply being that we have been separated from friends and classmates by time and distance, with no way to connect. I graduated in 1987, there were no cell phones with cameras or ipods and there was definitely no internet. Compact disks came out my senior year, before that popping a cassette into your walkman was cutting edge. With a fresh set of batteries, you’d do well to get through both sides of Def Leopards’ “Hysteria” before the gradual slowing of the tape went from a minor annoyance to a cruel joke (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, count your blessings you were born in an age when music players work using all non-moving parts.) My point is this: for kids in school today, all this technology is normal, they don’t know anything else. When they want to call their friends, they reach into their pocket, pull out their phone and make a call. Ask any of them how many times they’ve searched for a payphone when they needed to make an urgent call, I guess that it’s probably not that many. Hell, ask them what a rotary phone is. When I was in school, answering the phone ‘hello’ was a question. You didn’t know who was calling because there wasn’t any caller I.D. Hello…..? Somewhere I still have the recordings of prank phone calls we used to make to easily angered, unsuspecting victims; a pastime far too risky in today’s information age. Instead of talking, kids today type on the wall of their friends’ Facebook page, it’s the norm. And most likely, they will stay connected with these same people after they graduate and move far away from each other, following each others lives’ with ever increasing detail and in real time using things like Facebook until the next thing comes along to make Facebook antiquated. Ask any high schooler what a photo mat is; we’re back to moving parts again. Point your phone, take a picture, send it instantly anywhere in the world to as many people as you want. College graduation, point the phone. Getting engaged, point the phone. Buying a house, point the phone. First child, you get the picture, no pun intended. And I haven’t even mentioned video…. So it’s not surprising when someone of my generation joins Facebook and jumps in head first; you quickly find out there’s a lot of catching up and keeping up to do with people you never thought you’d “see” again, certainly not on a daily or weekly basis. Never mind all the people you never knew you knew! I don’t know the point of my little rambling. If I didn't know any better, I'd say it sounded like I was getting old. I feel like I’m all over the map here, if you’ve made it to the end, maybe you could explain to me what I was trying to get across, whether you’re next door or on the other side of the world.