In which I discover Facebook

I have been sucked into the world of Facebook.



I had an invitation from an old friend a few weeks ago to view his photos there, and then another one came from someone I hadn't seen since elementary school (!), so I thought I'd give it a whirl. Within three days I have been reunited with people I haven't seen since 1987 (and the elementary school friend--1979!), as well as most of my current friends, whose response when I arrived on the Facebook scene was basically, "well, it's about time".



I felt much as I would if I'd stumbled into a room full of my friends having a get-together, where everyone had been expecting me but to which nobody had remembered to invite me. A bit surreal!



I'm of two minds about Facebook at this point--part of me marvels at this super-fun toy that allows me to get snippets from the lives of friends I rarely (or never) see, and which frequently make me laugh out loud. The other part of me is boggled by this and all the other electronic stuff out there that we use to keep track of things, and all the things we feel we need to keep track of. I'm a little wistful for the warm summer afternoons of my childhood, when I walked to my friends' houses and knocked on their door to ask, face-to-face, if they could come out and play.