I am so happy to hear all the responses to my most recent post (:oD) but I am afraid that I am still not satisfied.  I do agree that there are vast differences in how different people use facebook and I agree that it is a very useful tool in understanding the facts of a person's life, but I still think there is a problem.  When I think about all the friends I have on facebook (the real ones that I have in Real life to) I am overwhelmed.  I read up on their lives, I stress out when bad things happen to them, I cry when I learn sad things about them, and I send them emails or sometimes even call them; but there are just too many of them and I feel stretched thin.  I just can't dedicate enough time to any one of them.

In an "old fashioned" friendship you would have to have lunch or grab some coffee and that action would take up significant time.  You could only fit so many friends into one day and because of that you spent the whole day thinking about only one or two of your friends.  On face book, when you have so many friends vying for your attention, only the ones in crisis (good or bad) really get your thoughts and attention.  It is possible that you sign on just because you where thinking about a friend and you then go and write them a message (I do this) but how easy is it to get distracted by another friend who has some exciting news or another who has a crisis? 

When I first joined facebook I was amazed and immeasurably relieved.  It is always extremely painful to leave friends behind when you move whether it is for school, or work, or whatever reason.  But with programs like facebook, you don't really have to say goodbye in the same way.  You can hold on to all of your old friends while hopefully making new friends in your new location, and then when you move again you can keep holding on to those friends too.  Pretty soon it is easy to find yourself holding on to dozens if not hundreds of ghosts of friendships that you can't bare to think of losing.  But people are just not made to have that many close friends.  You can't possibly give as close attention to 100 friends as you could to 5.  Imagine for a moment what it would be like if I only had one friend.  Since Emily read the other post I will use her as an example.  So if Emily were my only friend (I am also taking out friends who are family, sorry mom and Aunt Beth) I could call her all the time, hear both "important" and "unimportant" details of her life, I could go up and visit her and get to know her family.  In short, I would eventually know her in a way that would enable me to live my life alongside hers.  My life would be tied up in hers completely.  Now there are obviously other problems with only having one friend but isn't this friendship that I am talking about a rare and powerful thing?  Does anyone remember in Anne of Green gables when Anne finds her true bosom friend and it is so wonderful? That is what I am talking about.  That is the kind of friendship that wouldn't have worked if there were 10 of them.  And I don't think it would work if they were not friends in person.  You can have an amazing pen pal, but I doubt they would because your best friend.

Please don't get me wrong; I am not going to boycott facebook.  I think it is an extremely useful tool, but even in some of the ways it is useful it can be harmful.  For example, facebook is extremely helpful to people, like me, who lack some crucial communication skills.  I can spend however long I want composing my thoughts and then I only have to write a few words to explain the situation and let everyone else figure out the details on their own.  Now, as much as I appreciate this, wouldn't it be better if I were just forced to learn how to talk and write intelligently?  I read some old letters recently that got me thinking about this subject.  They were correspondence between a mother and her son during the Revolutionary War or something like that.  The language in these letters was superb and nearly made me cry at how much we have lost of the English language in such a short time.  Every word choice was intentional and thought out; every phrase perfectly formulated to not only give the direct meaning but to hint at other ideas that pertained to her subject. What really gets to me though is how insignificant this woman and her letter was.  She wasn't writing a book, she probably didn't expect many more people than her son to read it but she still took that much care.  She took that care for her son and the very attention she gave her language said that she loved him.  She gave as much attention (probably a day just writing it all down) to keeping in touch when her son was far away as she would have if he were right down the block.

I am proposing that this is the only way true long distance friendships really work.  Long distance friendships Always take more work than physically present ones because you miss so much more of them and I am wary of programs that claim to make it easy to keep in touch.  There is just no way that I can think of for a person to keep up 100 or even 20 really meaningful friendships.  Ease of communication does not mean depth of language, and without depth of communication, I don't know how you can be friends.

P.S. If any of you made it to the bottom of this, you must be pretty good friends. :o)  Sorry it was soooo long, I would edit (goodness knows it needs it) but I need to get some "real" work done!

Well I am finally back home in Santa Fe, back from my trip to New York.  I realized when I got back that we had only moved to Santa Fe about two weeks before I left for New York and since I stayed in New York for two weeks also I felt sort of discombobulated about where my home really was.  Mostly I just wanted to get back to where Nathan was and that was what made this a trip home. 

I really did feel like I got to know the neighborhood while I was in New York.   I was on the upper west side (Manhattan) on Amsterdam between 106th and 1007th street and I was constantly reminded of that fact about 20 times a day.  New York is a very weird place in that, if you wanted to, you could pretty much never go more than a few blocks away from your apartment and have everything you need to live a pretty comfortable life.  The effect that this has is that the community within those few blocks is extremely close.  When I was working in the store I was constantly being interrupted by people introducing themselves, wondering who I was, and asking what I was doing.  Many people stopped by every day for a progress report on how the shop was coming along and by the time I left the Laundromat workforce, the Duncan Doughnuts’ employees, the local grocery store, local deli, and frozen yogurt staff all remembered me and would ask about the progress of the project I was working on. 

In New York everyone seems to be in each other’s business all the time but not necessarily in a bad way.  I kept thinking that if I was doing the same project in Aztec or in La Mirada I might get a few people asking what I was doing but no one would just stop and stare for 30 minutes while I cut up wood with a miter saw on the sidewalk.  Part of everyone’s fascination in my re-design project was actually because of me.  It was apparently VERY shocking that a “young lady” would be in a position to tell grown men (our workforce) what to do and it was even more shocking that I could do most of their jobs for them when I wanted to.   In the beginning my age and sex was an incredibly frustrating barrier.  When I asked the men (who I was supposed to be directing) to do something they would generally respond my asking how old I was (one guy guessed 16!  I never told them my actual age) or telling stories that ended with “but that was probably before you were even born.”  Just as an interjection here, most of these guys where in there late twenties, thirties, and I would guess that only two or three of the hired help was in their forties (not including the regular store employees).   I also got endless numbers of men stopping by the store telling me how dangerous the miter saw (or whatever other tool) was and how I should really get a man to help me with that sort of thing.  It was hardly better when they finally realized that I knew what I was doing.  At that point I kept having guys stop and tell me how hot it was to see a woman who knew how to use tools like that which then made me incredibly self conscious since I was constantly having to work out in front of the store in front of a crowd (literally) of onlookers.  I realized eventually that I had to choose whether or not I was going to get offended and I concluded that these guys just didn’t know what to do with me but they didn’t mean any harm or offense. In the end I just had to except the compliments and be very firm and plain about what I wanted and didn’t want from the workers or onlookers.

Subtlety is not really something that New Yorkers do.  Not many people in the neighborhood seemed to worry about offending people which was very strange and made me fairly uncomfortable much of the time.  For example, the people I was with would almost always refer to people by their nationality: the Russian down the street, the Yemenis’ Deli, the Ecuadorian construction worker.  Also they would often make broad generalizations about those nationalities.  Somehow this seemed to be ok but I am not sure how or why.  One interesting thing was that everyone spoke Spanish and not necessarily English, which made things very interesting when I was trying to give instructions or trying to explain why a certain paint color was a good choice.

Well, I think I better wrap-up for now but I am sure I will write more later.