Obsession...or not

My current Facebook status =

Jennifer Watson is laughing. Chris sees me sitting in our living room tap-tap-tapping away on my laptop and says with a huge grin, "OK, I think it's official that this is now an obsession."

I look at him, knowing in one way that he is right, but also knowing that he's also just a little bit wrong.

"It's not an obsession," I say.

"I know," Chris replies. "I just think that it's kind of funny."

"No, really, it's not an obsession," I persist. "We've been living so long just the two of us that it feels really good to be reaching out to other people."

And it's true.

Chris and I are both very extroverted introverts.

We love to see friends and family and do social things, but both of us tend to regenerate much better with down time...alone. And sometimes we get in the habit of not necessarily reaching out to other people to make plans. So a weekend rolls around and it's just the two of us.

We kind of get in a rut of hanging out as Just The Two Of Us.

Don't get me wrong - we always have a great time together even if we have no plans. Chris is wonderful, fabulous and extremely entertaining company (and I hope that I am, in turn, wonderful, fabulous and extremely entertaining company for him...he keeps me around so I'll assume that I am.)

However, there is that danger that we sometimes let ourselves slip into a world of Just The Two Of Us and end up feeling like we don't have enough friends.

And so along comes Facebook.

I'm embarrassed to say that I have poo-poo'd FB for a very long time. Thought it was something for kids. A waste of time. Dumb. Etc.

I stand corrected.

It's been a wonderful and fascinating experience to open myself up to people via this social networking site. So far I haven't done any of the games or the causes and I'm not a "Fan" of anything or anyone. (And I doubt that I'll pursue any of that aspect of FB anytime soon. Not really all that interested...) Nor have I made it my goal to have 682 Friends. Good heavens, I can hardly manage the few that I have already. I don't think that I am quite ready to make all kinds of new virtual friends.

What I am enjoying is the contact with my "actual" friends and family near and far. And reaching out to people with whom I haven't had contact in weeks, months, a few years or even many years. It's nice to read their "walls," see what's going on in their lives and let them know what's happening in my life and thoughts. Nice to be making plans to see folks who live near and perhaps to open us up to future visits to people who live far away.

The closer I get to becoming a parent, the more I realize how vital it is to seek out and open myself up to friends. To create and shore up that support system for me, my husband, our child.

Our family.

We can't and shouldn't try to do it all alone.

Or end up doing it alone out of complacency.

It takes work to maintain relationships. Something I can't say that I've always done very well in the past. I've reached out to people and enjoyed their friendship for a time only to pull inside of myself and let the friendship languish during times when my life was difficult. There are a lot of e-mails in my "Sent Items" box with the subject line "Long lost friend says hello" and the first line of the e-mail reading "I'm so very sorry that it's been so long since I've been in touch."

I don't want to send those e-mails anymore.

And so I am on Facebook and working hard to reach out to people. To forge and re-forge relationships that I haven't shepherded well into my 41st year. To maintain those relationships. To share myself not just when it's convenient or only when I'm feeling really up. But also when things are hard and when I want to pull away and retreat into myself. To keep reaching out and know that there will be people there for me during the hard times.

And for me to reciprocate. For me to be there for friends and family during their hard times. For me to be part of their support systems and to reach out when they need it.

So maybe I'm spending just a wee bit too much time on my laptop these days, but I'm fairly certain that this is temporary and will pass. Eventually I imagine that I will have some kind of routine and will limit myself to a certain amount of time of FB...and, of course, the needs of the Little One will likely severely limit my computer time!

But for now....yeah, a little obsessed.

See you on Facebook!

Too much sharing...part two

I have succumbed. I admit it.

“To what?” you ask.

To alcohol?

No.

To drugs.

No.

Retail therapy?

No.

Smoking?

Good heavens, no!

Then…to what?

Facebook.

Darn it all.

I started a Facebook page way back when, but found the wall and the layout too confusing. I also felt that I was too old and not cool enough to do social networking and so I let it lay fallow for months and months and months. But recently, I had to make a professional Facebook page (don’t ask) and it reminded me of the personal one I had started so long ago... of the friend requests that I received over the last few months for the dormant personal page that I neither confirmed nor officially ignored and so I gave in…

I am apparently a lemming following the rest of the Facebook lemmings over the Facebook cliff.

Last night I resurrected the Facebook page that had been languishing since September. I accepted all of the Friend requests and “Friended” (when the heck did “Friend” become a verb???) a few people myself.

Poor Chris (who I had not seen all day) got a brief kiss from me, a few minutes of conversation and then watched me from over the top of his book at the kitchen table as I sunk down in the living room behind my laptop to tap furiously away at my keyboard….

Accepting friends.
Friending.
Finding friends.
Sending messages to long lost friends that Facebook helped me to find.

Delighting in all that is social networking!!

It’s like a drug.

Chris gave up at around 9:30 p.m. and took himself off to the bedroom to read and eventually doze off while I, the crazed lemming, looked at my new friends’ walls to read about the minutiae of their lives.

Too much sharing?

A few of my colleagues and I were in a meeting and chatting about the strange world in which we now live - the world of sharing one's every thought and activity with "the world" via blog, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. (Please note that I am SO not cool enough to send out Tweets via Twitter...I have opted instead to blog, which is apparently SO over....according to a New York Times article Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest...only 7.4 million blogs of the 133 million blogs tracked by Technorati were updated in the last 120 days....)

One of my colleagues expressed confusion about Twitter, "I don't really understand what it is," he says.

Another colleagues pipes up, "It's like micro-blogging. You get 160 characters and you send those out into the world. If you want to follow someone's Twittering you can choose to have it viewed on your computer or sent directly to your cell phone."

"So, what exactly do you do on Twitter?" asks the first colleague.

"Well, it's like people share their most immediate thoughts or activities and it creates usually really stupid dialogues like, 'Oh, I have to go to the bathroom' and then someone else Tweet's back, 'Really, I just went to the bathroom like 10 minutes ago!'"

Everyone laughs.

"It's so WEIRD that people want to share that stuff with the world!" exclaims another colleague in our meeting.

Are we sharing too much?

For me there isn't much draw in Tweeting via Twitter (in part because "Tweet" and "Twitter" just sound so...stupid) because I can't express enough in just 160 characters. I opted to blog at first simply to provide friends, family and colleagues regular updates about our adoption experience. However, since writing comes about as naturally to me as breathing this format seems to be working well for me.

But am I sharing too much?

I am a LONG-TIME journal keeper - since I was 13 and now I'm 41. When I write about my life and experiences in my private journals, obviously I don't hold back. This blog has certainly, at least for the time being, replaced my private journals and I find myself sharing quite a bit with "the world." Should I be holding back here? I mean - people with whom I work are reading this.

In our conversation on Friday, some of my colleagues and I questioned whether it's a good idea to post crazy or exceptionally personal things on places like Facebook or in a blog.

"A lot of employers," says one of my colleagues, "actually go to Facebook pages to check out prospective employees. I mean, if you've posted a photo of yourself drunk and stupid on your Facebook page, is that what you want your future employer to be seeing?"

Do my colleagues need to know my inner-most thoughts and fears about becoming a mom? Will it make them uncomfortable when they see me around the office?

This same colleague went on to describe the case of a young teacher who was denied her teaching certification because of a photo she posted on her Facebook page showing her wearing a pirate hat, holding what looked like a mug of beer, and captioned "Drunken Pirate." The young teacher apparently appealed the decision and was ultimately granted her certification.

What if I leave this job eventually and as I'm searching for another job my prospective future employer Googles me and encounters this blog? Will I have shared too much and will that person be turned off to me? Will I lose out on a job because I have shared too much?

Why DO we feel so compelled in today's world to share so much of our private lives? Whether it's reporting on your bathroom trips via Twitter or your Drunken Pirate party experience on Facebook or your experience of becoming an adoptive parent as reported on BlogSpot.com?

I can't answer for anyone else, but for me...I like to read people's personal stories. I can't say that I would particularly care to read about everyone's need to head to the loo, but somehow I find that reading other people's stories about motherhood, their professional lives, their spiritual lives, etc. helps me to order my own world. I so appreciate that these folks are willing to share - to be brave and put their thoughts out there.

It's kind of like the way I prefer to read fiction narratives to non-fiction or biographies. I relate better to a story when I understand what the character is thinking via inner monologues and the dialogue of that character with other characters in the book. I recently finished reading March by Geraldine Brooks (a fantastic read if you need a new book!) and learned more about the Civil War than I ever did during the history classes I was forced to take in high school (history classes in which I had to attempt to digest the most dry, boring history text books in the world) because the characters were so compelling and I felt that I was living just a little bit of that experience through their tales.

A true personal story or a fictionalized account of a person experiencing an historical event simply resonates with me and stays with me.

And so I read blogs to learn about how other people are coping with their lives. What they're thinking and feeling and doig about those thoughts and feelings. And this helps me to bring order to my own thoughts and my own life. It is comforting to know that other really bright, intelligent men and women struggle with the same issues that crop up in my own life (not that I wish struggles on anyone!) Reading about how these bloggers work through those struggles is often quite inspiring.

And sometimes I leave a comment or two - maybe something that might help them even a little in working through whatever it is they need to work through or even just to remind them when they're struggling that there are other folks out there who can empathize. A comment that says, "I hear you."

For me - blogs represent shared human experience. Perhaps I am hoping that by sharing my experience with people "out there" in the blogosphere that something in my story may help them make some order of their own experiences. Maybe someone will hear me, too and leave me that little comment that makes all the difference.

And so my plan is to continue to share my inner-most thoughts about this adoption journey and, most likely, to continue sharing about my experience of motherhood once the Little One arrives and we become Plus One.

Have I shared too much here?