Interminably Connected

You like that? "Interminable" was one of the vocabulary words for my 11th graders when I taught at West. My kids swore people never used the word...

Believe it or not, when I went off to college in the fall of 1997, only one person I knew had an e-mail address (through AOL) and that was because his father taught at a university in Fort Worth and the whole family was up to date on technology trends. I had never even been on the Internet. Really. So, when I got to college, there was this novelty awaiting. And, it turns out, I was a natural. I could search and find most everyone I looked for. I could find information I needed. I would sit in the computer lab on the 2nd floor of Russell Hall working on a Mac (another novelty) and people would start asking me questions about how to do things on the computer, never suspecting that I was a newbie, as they were. Because it came so easily, I went to free workshops about how to set up web pages on the college server, and I even ended up teaching some of my friends how to do it. I had found my gift...technology.

The e-mail thing turned out to be not as great as I thought it would be. First, it wasn't as personal as a hand-written letter, and you couldn't tell a person's tone as well as you could if you were face-to-face. Second, educated people's grammar started deteriorating in front of my eyes and there wasn't a dang thing I could do about it. Third, I couldn't make a fresh start. I was, as I coined the phrase then, "interminably connected." I went to a college where I didn't know anyone, and yes, it was lonely, but I wanted to take that adventure head on. Instead, I got sucked into leftover high school drama via e-mail. Ugh.

Mom and Dad subscribed to AOL that Thanksgiving (their first time with Internet too, I suspect), and I'm pretty sure I spent most of the break chatting in chat rooms...for the first time (and almost last time) in my life. At first I understood the draw, the anonymity, the being able to talk to people you didn't know about anything you wanted to. And then I started to feel empty. I didn't know these people. I didn't really want to know these people. I wanted to know real people and see their expressions, hear their vocal inflection, learn about their sense of humor by watching their body language. Once I had that figured out, I no longer chatted with strangers.

So, I had been turned off to both e-mail and chat rooms. E-mail made a comeback when I moved nearly 2 hours away from my boyfriend (now husband). I didn't have a cell phone (that's another story altogether) and e-mail was the cheapest/quickest way to communicate. We still sent each other sweet nothings via what was now being call "snail mail." I'll tell you that I still have every thing Eli ever sent me through the post office--the fact that he took the time to mail it made it worth keeping. I do not, however, have every e-mail he ever sent me. In fact, most of them are gone, deleted with my hotmail account when I forgot to log in for 30 days after I got married and started grad school and Eli was right there with me so I didn't need to e-mail him. Oh, well.

The good and bad thing about e-mail is that if you don't know someone's e-mail address, you can't really look it up unless they're affiliated with a university or company that and are listed in the public directory. And hence, we lose touch. I change from @hotmail.com to @gmail.com, and don't ever get around to telling everyone my new e-mail address. Perhaps by accident, perhaps by intentional neglect. Who knows?

Anyway, two summers ago I was in the summer musical at Theater Tuscaloosa with a whole bunch of college kids, and I kept hearing them talk about Facebook. "Now we're officially friends, since we're FB friends." I had heard of Facebook and social networking, but when I had looked into it, it was restricted to e-mail addresses that ended in .edu and my graduate e-mail address had just been deactivated. I was out of luck. But after hearing the college kids talk, I came to understand that Facebook had opened its doors to the general public. I didn't join the bandwagon just then (my school's filter wouldn't allow access to Facebook and I didn't have time to go to the public library). It wasn't until the end of July when I flew back to Texas to help my mom when she broke her wrist that I joined the phenomenon. They had just set up a wireless Internet router at the house, so when everyone was at work or wherever, I sat on the couch and surfed.

I'll say that in the past 16 months I have reconnected with many, many people, and stayed in touch more dynamically with people I talk to monthly if not more often, but most of them were just a one-time "Hey, how's it going?" deal. Some of the people I couldn't even remember until I accepted their request and then surfed their profile, wiping away cobwebs and fighting the amnesia. And then my students started finding me...(but that's another story altogether, too). Sometimes I'll accept a friend request just to appease someone's curiosity, but seeing that they have over 300 friends, a few weeks down the line, I will quietly delete them from my friends because we use that term "friend" too loosely. They'll probably never notice, anyhow. (If you are reading this, there's a 99.9% chance that you have not been deleted. Otherwise, how'd you get here? Haha.)

And all this brings me to some good news: This week I have reconnected with three of my FAVORITE PEOPLE from my adult life.

1. First, Cooper found me. I always talk about him when I talk about my favorite librarians ever. I've actually been in contact with him a little bit over the couple of years, but FB lets me be apprised of the everyday mundane stuff we women like to keep up with.

2. Second, I found Jinohn. The girl, who was my Co-RA on the third floor of Collins my senior year of college, has a zest for life like no one else I know. She's always smiling, she's unapologetically goofy, and she's graciously ambitious in ways I've never seen before.

3. Third, Michelle found me. I worked with Michelle for two years in Austin, and she is, to this day, hands down, one of the most talented teachers I have ever come into contact with. The last I saw her was at her wedding, which was one of the two best weddings I have ever attended (I love to dance--I can't help it!). That was just over three years ago. I had an old address for her and sent a letter that was returned. I looked for her in online white pages, and I probably looked for her on Facebook, but I couldn't find her. I'm so glad she thought of me after she joined. :)

So, I'm thankful for this interminable connection, though it can be both good and bad. But then, isn't that just the nature of technology? I'm going to think about this a little more...