Old Friends

Old friends

One can use myspace and its vast array of tools for many things: stalking, for one, is always enjoyable when you are not (and never could be) caught. Blogging, for some, is appealing, as is reading other blogs, if you are prone to voyeurism. Listening to music, and posting mass bulletins is yet another appeal. My favorite past time on this website, however, is finding old friends. When you think of the friends (or lovers) whom you have lost over the years, it is an odd feeling. How do you go from loving someone, and thinking they will always grace your life, to knowing nothing about them? And an even more puzzling question- how do you befriend someone, confide in them, laugh and occasionally cry with them, and then less than a decade later, forget their last names? Or did you ever know their last names to begin with?
I have so far found old college friends, old high school friends, several old family friends, and a few old flames. I have contacted some of them, some with terrible results, some who I could reinstate into my category of current friends. Others, I have kept watch on. I check back periodically to make sure they have accrued more friends, or posted new blogs, or added more pictures. And I find myself increasingly frustrated with people who have yet to add themselves to myspace. I run searches for people whom I have endless curiosity about. The guy who broke my heart before Jake came along, the kid who used to bench press full milk bottles in the hall of my dorm at ASU, my ex-roommate, whose boyfriend was jailed midway into our second semester, the kid in high school who vanished and was never heard from again. Surely, these people have heard of myspace and its many wonders. Surely they, too, must have curiousity about people long past...
Sometimes checking someone's page just once is plenty. You find they are still alive, or have gotten quite large, or had 13 kids, and you find your desire for information has been quenched. And yet others, you check on a weekly basis. If someone could have told me, or any of us for that matter, that friends we thought we had permanently deleted from our rolodex would forever be able to keep tabs on us without the private investigator fees, I would have thought them quite loony. But if you happen to be one of the 25 people who have read this blog since the start of the week, and we at one time knew each other well, welcome back to my life, old friend.