Old friends on Facebook and Myspace

While I write this blog which serves for me as a place to open my skull and pour out everything onto your desk, or your lap for our mutual entertainment, I also read a lot.  Why not, I’ve got the time, right?   I hit one of my tech blogs and they describe this tendency of people to look up old flames and Time Magazine of all places coined the word “Retrosexual” to describe it.

Retrosexual huh?  Cute.  Quick!  Someone grab retrosexual.com before some link farmer does!

Reading this I was thinking of their description of trawling the Internet search sites, Google, Facebook, and Myspace looking for folks that people went to high school and college with and it had me thinking.   Why not look through your past and find old friends and old flames?   What they do with them when they’re found is their own business.   I’m sitting here thinking what do I have to be smug about, I’ve done pretty much that same thing…  almost.

I’ve searched through Google and had good luck finding old friends from College and High School, a few teachers, and even a person who shares my first and last uncommon name in a small farming town in Nebraska.   With a last name like mine, we’re related if you go back far enough.   We figure five generations or so should fit.  Nice guy and we always talk like long lost friends when we do for a LONG time.

There are others I’ve reconnected with like an ex in Palm Springs who I’m truly happy to know is doing well, a couple random college friends here and there, but never to date.   I’m the person who says “there’s a reason they are your ex”, for right or for wrong.  

What struck me as amusing and perhaps a bit ironic is that Time Magazine is hitting on this like its new and a big deal.   I met my present partner on the old dial up bulletin boards after a year and a half of chat in 1992.   Print media, trailing the trend, behind the curve again.   Meeting people online has been going on since the first emails were sent back in the dusty old days and will go on until we pull the plug.   Meeting new people happens on a daily basis, meeting “new old people” is a natural curiosity and is only an extension of the High School Reunions, just on your own terms.  There are class websites and ones that promise to keep you connected with everyone in your school once you sign up and pay a fee such as Classmates which can make it easier. 

An interpersonal relationship is as innocent or as tawdry as the people in it.   It all depends on where your head’s at.  That’s a trend that is old as mankind.