Just Blame It On FaceBook !!!!

Okay, I must admit that I've been a bit distracted lately. Yes, there has been a lot going on around here since my last blog post in February. But I must confess that now that I have a computer I have no reasonable excuse for neglecting my blog. My excuse is not reasonable but it may be considered understandable. My excuse is that I have become totally absorbed by Face Book. So, I've decided whenever you need an excuse for something, for anything at all...............from now on...................... JUST BLAME IT ON FACE BOOK !!!!

It's not like my Face Book account is new or anything, I've had it for a couple of years now. My cousin talked me into setting up a Face Book account so that I could view her photos. I would check it every now and then whenever I was checking my email at the public library but I had no idea of what I was missing out on. I had a few people on my friends list but not many. Now, I check it every single day and I have 112 friends. All 112 people on my list are people I actually know or at least used to know. When MyHoney joined FB and was adding people to his friend's list from school, I thought "those are people you haven't seen or talked to in 30 plus years". Now I've added people all the way back to first grade (1967-1968). It has been fun.

Face Book is an amazing thing. It's almost like a magic trick. You can see it with your own eyes but still have no idea of how it works. You just know that it does work. It also amazes me how little we have all changed. Personality wise we are still pretty much the same people as we were in first grade, maybe just a better version of ourselves. What I liked about a certain person back then is STILL what I like about them now, thirty-plus years later. The thing about friends from that long ago is they knew us way back when. They saw us go through those awkward stages, saw us with braces on our teeth, our first really bad haircut or the goofy clothes that we thought were cool back then. They knew our parents and/or our brothers and sisters. They rode the same school bus with us and some of them came to spend the night at our houses and spent most of the night, laughing and giggling during our slumber parties. Some of them remember our mom's special pot-roast and the names of our horses or the fact that we had a pet monkey. What people remember from so many years ago, is like a surprise package that you open and delight in how much of a surprise it is.

Having a teenage stepdaughter, I pay a lot of attention to what goes on with teenagers these days. On some points, I am amazed on some points I am shocked. But each generation has their own time, their own way, their own style. I am often overwhelmed by the amount of information they are willing to share and especially how personal in nature some of that information is. I've asked myself "what would it have been like to have been a teenager during the "Internet Era" ???? I remember passing notes in class to tell someone something really important and if the content of that note had been revealed it would have been devastating to say the least. Keeping secrets was the real test of how good of a friend you were. If you failed to keep a friend's secret you were labeled as permanently ineligible for best friend status.
(Not qualifying as BFF, not even BF-FAW = best friend for a week, much less
FOREVER )

I remember, as a teenager,being very secretive and NOT wanting others to know what I was up to and where I was going, what I was doing or with whom....now days, it seems like everyone knows everything and no detail is too personal to be shared. Ayyy, the times have changed but human nature does not. This leads me to believe that there is more to this "sharing" thing than meets the eye. I continue to analyze, research and study "teenager" issues and when I can't figure out something I turn to the "experts" - other teenagers outside of our household. I've told them if I am brave enough to ask the question then they can be brave enough to answer the question, also adding that if there is anything that they feel uncomfortable with answering, that we can just skip it, no problem.

Another aspect of this Face Book thing, I considered how that if they had FB in the 1950's that MY MOM WOULD HAVE BEEN THE QUEEN OF FACE BOOK. My Mom would have loved FB. She knew everyone. She went everywhere. She was a social butterfly. She was networking before networking was invented. If anyone needed to know what was going on....all they had to do is ask. She knew what everyone was up to at all times. She was one of those 1950's era teenagers that kept a black & white scrapbook of her and her friend's hanging out in town at McClard's and Cooks Ice Cream. She had many photographs of them swimming at Camp Charleston, in their "way-to-cool" - "old-timey" swimsuits and cruising Central Avenue in those (now) "vintage" automobiles often with those fin-type fenders,since many of them were convertibles they went riding around with the top down. They were the collective definition of "cool" teenagers. When I was a kid, I thought of her era as being just like the movie "American Graffiti". It seemed so clean-cut, simple and safe compared to being a teenager in the 1970's.

Now compare that to my stepdaughter's teenage era with Internet Access, Cell Phones, Text Messages, Emails, Instant Messages, I-Phones, Picture Phones, YouTube, My Space and dear ole Face Book....like having a magic wand...poof....with one click and you are connected !!

Shall I dare ask what modern technology will add as a new dimension by time my stepdaughter's children are teenagers ????

As the old advertising campaign slogan goes: "It's a mind-boggling thing" !!!!