When we all still lived in the castle

OK, I’ve been a total slacker and the Typepad editor is still unusable by me. We’ll see if I can stand the formatting issues that come with a copy paste from Word.

Anyway, Total Slacker has been hanging out over on Facebook like a total addict. It’s OK, I have plenty of company. I’ve been hanging with Cielo and her husband too! There are a few more of you out there but for the sake of anyone wishing to remain anonymous I’ll leave that alone.

I’ve had a Facebook account for about fifteen months. I set it up at the request of friend from middle school who is currently expatriated just outside of London and it seemed like a good way to keep in touch. I didn’t have a lot of hope for it though and even mentioned in my profile that I was more likely than not to forget my user id and password and then that would be the end of me. Or at least the end of my Facebook presence.

Little by little I accumulated ‘friends’. Not too many and I didn’t do a blasted thing with them either. I kind of got it about this ‘wall’ thing and I had myself a vampire and a werewolf and knew how to send a virtual gift. Most of my friends were self selecting, they found me. If I knew them I said ‘yes’. If I didn’t know them I deleted the friend request (I did get some weird ones in the beginning).

Last April when we were in the Au Pair selection process I had this year’s Au Pair set up an account so that she could get to my account and look at pictures because I had been unsuccessful sending her anything. That was as useful as it ever got with the exception of being able to post family photo albums that nobody got to see any other way.

This October, just six months later, the nanny is jettisoned from the house (she was given 48 hours to retrieve her belongings properly chaperoned) and I needed to remove her from my Facebook profile. I needed to remove her, my daughter needed to remove her and last years needed the boot as well. In this process of discovery I clicked something called Friend Finder and boy did I go to town. So, less one nanny and plus forty old friends. Yeah, you read that right. 40. And I don’t like people, remember?

Not all of them are intimate friendships. Some have become passing acquaintances. All of it is worth networking value and the entertainment factor has been very high of late. I have reconnected with people I barely remember from high school, people I can’t believe I forgot from high school and people I can’t believe I ever walked away from at the high tech company.

I found my old best friend. The one I had when we all still lived in the castle and Jeffrey wasn’t anywhere near dead and four of us ran in a pack (we’re still missing one and Jeffrey, well, he’s kind of dead) and the world was young and good and we were all gods of the burgeoning virtual world. And nothing really awful had happened to any of us yet. As adults that is.

And then all hell broke lose and the four of us split right down the middle and I didn’t see her again, well, until yesterday.

And all I want to do is find a way to tell Jeffrey it’s all right now. I found a way to stop being alone. I found a way to get back home.