Lift Up Your Hearts!

They say trying new things keeps your mind young.  I should be in good shape, having recently ventured into two areas I was sure I'd never touch, finding them useless at best.  One is Facebook, which I had classed—along with MySpace and LifeJournal—as boring, yet time-wasting websites for teenaged girls to gossip and bully each other, and for sexual predators to troll for victims.  But Janet was invited to join by her oboe professor, so how could she say no?  Then she had so much fun finding people with whom she'd lost contact that I decided to see what it was all about.

No doubt it is a good place for teenaged bullying and dangerous liasons, but it doesn't have to be, and I've been surprised at how many friends I've found or been found by already.  I love sending Christmas letters, because it keeps us in contact with friends whose lives for the most part no longer intersect with ours.  I sense that this logic has no appeal to the Facebook generation, which may never lose that contact.  Perhaps the greatest danger (predators and bullies aside) is in being overwhelmed by trivial, shallow contact.  The signal-to-noise ratio is rather poor.  At least in a Christmas letter one is forced by space limitations to keep to the more important issues.

I've been enjoying my Facebook experience so far, mostly for the contacts I've made with people.  It will never replace this blog—I haven't yet figured out how to say something of substance there; I'm sure there's a way, but it's not obvious.  And I doubt I'll get into many of the "applications" that abound; most seem like silly time-wasters to me.  But so far it's been a good experience.

So, too, with my venture into another young persons' game:  SMS, aka texting, aka sending text messages via my cell phone.  I never saw the point, prefering either direct phone calls (faster, easier, clearer) or e-mails (definitely easier to type).  But then Janet discovered that she can receive SMS's for free, and it suddenly became a great way to send her long-distance hugs.  Short messages that don't need to have much substance, but tell her I'm thinking of her.  I can send them when I'm away from my computer, and she doesn't have to wait to get home to her computer to receive them.  I'm funny about it, though.  I hate those texting abbreviations and refuse to send "u" for "you."  I'm slowly being weaned from my need always to start sentences with upper case letters and to include all proper punctuation; I'll let that slip and will even abbreviate some wrds whn im in a hrry.  But it pains me to do so, and thus I'm a very slow texter.  So what?  It still works for me.

However, today's Drabble was irresistable: