Lost and Found

Some days is seems like Facebook has become the worlds greatest and most useful Lost and Found on Earth. On other days, it appears to be more of an entertainment avenue providing billions of bored office workers across the globe endless hours of entertainment while they attempt to look like they are doing actual work when ever the boss walks by.

Ever since I was guilted into joining Facebook about a year ago, people from a past life in a podunk map dot of a town have been crawling out of the woodwork and inviting me to be their friend. Many have been people I was at least remotely interested in getting to know again after an almost 15 year lapse in communication and readily accepted their requests. Some have been people I always wondered what happened to after parting ways post graduation, and a few have been from people I never liked back then and would rather see a death notice for them than accept their request. Thankfully the latter of which has been very small in numbers, though Facebook keeps telling me I should send them a message or a friend request in its not so subtle way almost daily. Luckily those too can be ignored.

I have gone through the cycle of adding everyone who sends a request, except for those I have good reason to ignore, searching for people I was actually interested in reconnecting with, and recently purging my friends list of all those with whom I am no longer interested in being in contact with, or in some cases never really was interested in the first place. I now reserve my friends list for those with whom I actually know, am related to in some way, work with but still consider more than a coworker, and miscellaneous others I wish to remain in contact with via the Internet. My lost and found box is now well under 100 friends thanks to this new policy.

I have also considered abandoning my Facebook profile more than once over the last few months but instead have simply managed to log in less and ignore it most weekends. The more I use Facebook, the less I use Facebook. By that I mean daily usage. In the beginning, when it was all shiny and new with new things to explore and play with, I was on the site every day for multiple hours throughout the day. Now, I generally log in once a day, but not always, and often I can go an entire weekend without ever checking in to see what my friends are up to. I also try to update my status message at least once a day, in the beginning it was way more than that, but even that I don’t always manage to accomplish. When I was on vacation last November, I had Internet access daily, yet only logged into Facebook once or twice the whole trip. When I go home, there were more than 500 updates for me to read through, almost all of which were simple ignored or deleted rather than spending the time catching up on what I had missed while I was out of touch. Some things just aren’t that important.

But every once in a while, this little lost and found box on the Internet, the place where just about everybody with a minute or two of computer access knows to search for someone they lost along the road of life, comes in handy. I lost touch with someone I considered a good friend and probably the most intelligent person I knew my own age growing up. A well read, forward thinking boy who chose to rebel in high school by not cutting his hair for his last two years of school, a rather ingenious decision on his part I might add as it drove certain people crazy to see a boy with long hair in their little town. We had some of the same interests and worldly views and managed to spend a lot of time hanging out after school in high school in the craziest of places, the local library! We even shared the same mentor for a while, and I’m certain Jack would love to hear from him again as well. It’s not a name that has been brought up in our conversations over the last few years, but I know he too thought a lot of this kid and would be interested in hearing where he is now and what he’s been up to over the last 15 years.

So I guess since all things happen for a reason, the friend request today from my former partner in crime at the library, the one male friend I had growing up who was just as “quirky” as I was most of the time and never once judged me for being different that the herd, just might be the reason I haven’t abandoned Facebook yet. That little lost and found box has resulted in rekindling a friendship with someone I vowed never to speak to again and still can’t remember why, has helped build a stronger friendship with a few others in my current life, and now has turned up a long lost friend I was convinced I would never hear from again. It’s settled, Facebook stays, though I will probably continue to spend less and less time on there as time goes on. The shiny toy has lost a bit of its luster and become more of the tool it was originally intended to be.