ON CONNECTIONS:

Facebook has been a lot of things to me: Time-waster (Jetman, Scrabulous, Mob Wars), Faux-Stalking Assistance Tool, and Contact Point for students who want to informally contact me (and write poorly-punctuated messages about move-out times or damage charges). But I think my favorite thing has been that it has allowed me to connect or reconnect with so many different people.

In case it hasn't been perfectly obvious over the course of the past six weeks' worth of blog entries, I am an over-communicator. I tend to give more than I get in conversations (some would say it's because I'm a selfish jerk. I would tend to agree). For reasons unknown to my conscious mind, I seek to build and maintain friendships even when it's fairly clear that the other person doesn't care about (or outright dislikes) me. Maybe it's rampant insecurity because I didn't feel accepted in third grade. (I read that somewhere.) I don't know.

But in the past few months, I re-established a lot of relationships via facebook. People from high school who didn't like me then seem surprisingly* tolerant of me now. People from college who didn't really know me seem interested in getting to know me as a person. And people from my grad school days keep in contact with me, occasionally without prompting from me. It's...it's not overwhelming, but it's certainly whelming. For all the negative things you hear about facebook ("Local Man Accused of Faux-Stalking: Fauxs Cower In Fear!"), there are some positives to it.

Maybe this should have gone on my "On The Weather" post from a few days ago.

* I typed this as "surprisibly" the first time through. I have no idea why I like the sound of "surprisibly" so much, but it tickles my "grammar" funny bone.