Pearls My Mother Wore

Today I’ll be having lunch with a friend I’ve known since the fourth grade, and that would have been something like 41 years ago.  Amy has come back into my life via Facebook.  I’d been so unsure about FB when I signed up, but it’s far exceeded my stingy expectations.  I don’t think I was alone when I imagined FB to be some gossipy, sophomoric clique that I, once again, would be shunned by.  But, alas, I was wrong.

I’m happy to report that I now have 102 FB friends, and 28 of them wished me a happy birthday this week.  I’ve never received so many birthday wishes in my life.  Time and distance spent apart are of little consequence in the FB world.  I’ve picked up with folks right where we left off, only now, they have a ton of great stories to catch me up on.  Take for example, Janice.  She found me last week on FB.  She’s a 10^th grade, World History teacher in rural, Willits, CA.  Last time I saw her, we were hairdressers in the same salon.  She was into heavy metal music and I was into punk rock.  Her FB portrait has her standing high atop Machu Piccu, Peru!  Wow, I never would have predicted that!  She thinks she’ll be able to come to my next book signing on Aug. 21 at Book Passage.

My FB friend with the largest number of FB “friends” is Linda Watanabe McFerrin.  Notice that I sometimes use quotation marks around the word “friend.”  That is to distinguish between real acquaintances and cyber acquaintances who I may know of but don’t actually know.  Linda is a real-life friend who is on FB.  She’s a writer, teacher, and the Left Coast Writers maven of ceremonies.  She currently has 2556 FB “friends.”  She’s a marketing dynamo and spares no effort in getting the word out about her soon-to-be released novel, Dead Love.  A link to the book is under the “Handy Links” tab on the right of this blog – http://www.deadlovebook.com/

My FB “friend” who has the next highest number of “friends” is Steve Wozniak.  That’s right, THE Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple computers. He currently has 1992 FB “friends.”  How is it that I’m “friends” with Steve Wozniak?  In FB, when you want to connect with a person for the first time, you send them a “Friend Request.”  That can be a generic FB generated request, or there’s the option of personalizing it with a message.  One evening I was trolling through the lists of “friends” my friends have when I discovered that my friend David Talbot was friends with The Woz.  I personalized my friend request by telling Steve Wozniak that my husband was writing computer code for his own video games when he was in high school on an Atari computer.  I told him that Lutrell doesn’t think much of Facebook but that he would be impressed if he [Steve Wozniak] friended me.  The next day, I was “friends” with Steve Wozniak; he accepted my friend request.  Lutrell was mildly amused, but he’s still not crazy about FB.

I honestly don’t know what to make of all of this “friends” stuff, but it does put a smile on my face…book.

I’ll post again next Friday.  Until then, have a great week, and thank you for all of your comments last week.  I enjoy everything you have to say.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 9:40 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.