A New Beginning

I just moved here from Xanga. I took several years of abuse from it and eventually got sick of it. It can't do proper track-backs. The chances of losing a post are inversely proportional to how long it took to write. It's blocked from work for some reason, which is actually why I stopped writing in it. Let's hope Google's blogging software is as good as their other software. (As a side note, according to Google Maps, my house does not exist. I can see its roof, but no the address.) There are five basic areas to catch up on: career, academic, personal, political and general (mostly commentary). Today, I am focusing on personal.

Note to new readers: I am a twenty-eight-year-old whitish male. I live in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The house I own was in the flood zone last year. I work full time doing customer service in the utility field. I also attend University of Iowa, where I am majoring in American history. I plan to go to law school after I get my bachelor's degree in the summer of 2010. Today's post is mostly about Teddy, who I met while she was working at a local strip club. I was there as a customer.

I chose today to resume my blogging because I met Teddy four years ago to date. About a week ago, I logged into Facebook and noticed her last name had changed. I followed the link to her profile and found she had gotten married. I know she had her old last name a month ago, so it was fairly recently. I mention this for several reasons. I remember a few years ago she asked me what I was expecting out the friendship and I said I hoped we'd be invited to each other's weddings. We used to talk a lot about her life, but I've barely spoken with her in two years. I've messaged her a few times on Facebook. She accepted my friend request, but I haven't heard from her since. I've messaged her a few times, never the long things like I used to on MySpace, which I think were basically too demanding on her attention and freaked her out. I feel stupid. I never expected I'd be hanging out with her twice a week and talking basically daily like with Kitty, and I realize someone like her has probably a thousand people angling to be her best friend. I did hope for something beyond just being a Facebook friend, a new kind of social status that didn't even exist when I graduated high school or for several years after. I find myself wishing we really communicated on occasion.

An interesting wrinkle in this came a few months ago. One of her other friends told me that she had read my blog, discussed it with her friends and missed it when it was gone. This is the same sort of thing I was talking about with Facebook friends. I was born in 1980. I didn't grow up with all this web 2.0 like people her age did. I barely grew up with the Internet at all. I'm not sure I can get used to the idea that you don't really know who's connecting with you.

Speaking of Facebook, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it's tremendously convenient. It lets me keep up with the lives of friends who I'm not close enough to to have regular conversations, gets me invites to plays they appear in, parties, talks, etc and lets me connect with classmates. On the other hand, I find its search features rather wanting. For instance, I'd like to add Sadie. I know her real first name, which isn't very common, and the city where she lives, which isn't very big, yet I can't seem to work the search. I also can't seem to generate a list of single women in a network filtered by some criteria. I used to be able to do this. And, I am constantly vexxed by technical problems. For instance, I just found profiles for Infinity, who I haven't spoken with in ages, and a co-worker of mine. I can't add either as friends because the damn thing just turns into a spinny cursor.

Besides these problems, apps are way out of hand. Basically, they are money makers. This means lots of them give you incentives to try to get your friends to join and I am constantly deluged with requests to add some game, sometimes followed with a message begging me to do so so someone can get some in-game bonus for recruitment. Also, lots of punk kids mess around and pretend to get married and confuse me, which I suppose isn't really the site's fault.

Oh, and my mom joined. Her profile is just her name and birth date, no pictures, description, or anything. This tells me she isn't interested in actually using the site, just keeping an eye on people. So far, I have ignored her request.

I've had trouble writing for school lately and became concerned I was out of practice. I hope to start blogging regularly again. I have enough to keep me busy for months. For instance, out of the hundreds, possibly thousands of people I met, why is it Teddy one of the five or so that most sticks in my mind? (I plan to write about the others at length soon.) She's not the best looking woman I've known, the smartest or even the nicest (though she comes fairly close on all three counts) and I've certainly connected more with plenty of people. I don't really chat with most of my high school friends on Facebook, either and I hung around with them four years. I know the answer, but it will take a long time to cover (and the story isn't really about her at all), so it will wait.