Technology continues to increase its hold on our daily lives. When I was a kid and in high school the latest and greatest in audio equipment included finely balanced turntables, magnetic cartridges costing hundreds of dollars, direct-to-disk albums, reel-to-reel tape, and for portability there was that brand new invention, the Sony Walkman. A brand new form of banking - the Automated Teller Machine - was just coming into being. Personal computers were built with soldering irons and circuit boards and had 8" floppy drives and RAM measured in kilobytes. If you wanted to talk from your car to another you used a CB radio and said "good buddy" a lot. Programming was done in BASIC, PASCAL, FORTRAN, and COBOL on green screens. We thought technology had arrived!
In the midst of this time I went looking for a war buddy of my dad's. They had served together in the Marine Corps in Korea and shared many experiences and I wanted to find him - they hadn't seen each other in 30 years. I knew his name and the state he came from, and there are probably still operators in Washington state that remember helping that very persistent kid back in '79. It took me 3 weeks, and I was helped that he had a distinctive name. My dad was overjoyed - they talked on the phone, went to visit, and I found out that the stories my dad had been telling me for years weren't just "dad stories" - they were true. It was wonderful.
Now all of the technology I mentioned above is delightfully outdated. Audio has almost progressed past physical media and almost completely into the audio-file age wit .MP3s and such. Heck, even my car stereo has an .MP3 input and selector choice. Computers can be slapped together almost by unskilled labor, BASIC, PASCAL and FORTRAN are virtually dead languages and COBOL is on life support. Screens are only green if that happens to be the graphic you are using, CB radios have been replaced by cell phones and I can do a web search in my car if I want. I tried doing a search on my dad's friend last week online. I found him in a matter of minutes, even though he passed away several years back. I recently stood in line at a checkout counter listening to my .MP3 player as I used my cell phone to check my credit union balances (in Florida) and move money from one account to another so I could use my debit card to pay for my purchases, all in less than 3 minutes. I marveled that technology continues to advance and our lives are often made the better for it.
And then there's Facebook.
I'm a musician in one of my many lives, and after I got asked for the umpteenth time if I had a Facebook page while auditioning for a gig I decided to set one up. I did so, rationalizing that I was doing it for the contact value, and in that regard it has been very helpful. I loaded it with pictures of myself playing, friended a number of industry contacts and suppliers and felt like I was set. Then someone from my high school graduating class found and friended me and the floodgates opened.
I suddenly found myself receiving requests from people I had forgotten existed. Now, to be honest, some of them were pleasant surprises, but I have gotten friend requests from people I gladly saw the back of thirty years ago and have been blissfully ignorant of since - and suddenly they know where I am. People I couldn't stand and who couldn't stand me back then now want to be my "friend"... people who didn't even know me in school send me requests - where the heck were they back then? And why now? The band Bowling for Soup had a song entitled "High School Never Ends", and now, thanks to Facebook, that song can be quite true.
I will admit to a somewhat morbid curiosity, however. I caught up on what a lot of the old gang had done since graduation, and it was kind of interesting. There have been the good ones - the popular guy that went on to become a nationally known television personality (ok, he was a couple of years after me, but I'll give you a hint: he likes to tear things down and build 'em back up again), the later classmate that went on to become a country music star, the other classmate that became an internationally known opera singer, the classmate that went on to work with NASA, several guys I knew who started their own businesses and became quite successful, etc. Then there's the sad ones: the popular guy who died suddenly of pneumonia in his early 40s - the guy who dove his private plane into the ground showing off for his girlfriend - the girl I knew well who succumbed to cancer in her mid 40s - the guy who just collapsed one day of a heart attack just short of 50, the former girlfriend that was in a wreck in college and has lived her entire life in assisted living homes.
Of equal interest, albeit for different reasons, are the ones who have led strikingly mediocre lives, but who attempt to embellish them at every turn in what appears to be an attempt to inflate whatever it is they have been doing to some kind of enviable level. The truly academic style observation shows that their current personality is usually not far removed from what they were like when we were in school together and brings forth the question: am I seeing it now because it's so much worse, because I have matured, or a combination of the two? I'm thinking that it is the latter. Among these are -
- The guy who was a BMOC/jock back in "the day" - but has worked at a series of gas stations, convenience stores, and lawn service companies since then. A truly pitiable shadow of his former self, he still likes to talk about the glory days in school but on his current course the best he can probably ever hope for is a deluxe double-wide in the back of some trailer park in the south end of the county. Life has been going on while he's been marking time.
- The girl who was "wise beyond her years" or at least, in the way she talked - but was always something of a lover and seeker of the dramatic and hasn't changed. She managed to hold a couple of office jobs but never anything of any import. 2-3 husbands but no kids, now three decades on she hasn't yet learned that name-dropping and excessive use of acronyms and specialty terminology doesn't make you look "in the know" - it's just annoying, especially when you try to appear an authority on subjects your listeners know more about than you do. She never learned that life gives you enough opportunities to cry without manufacturing more.
- the former school bully who has apparently figured out that no one is afraid of him any more - and has no idea how to deal with that loss of power. He was a jerk back then and he's a jerk now, but one good apology and we could try to forget those things ever happened. We probably won't forget, but we'd probably be willing to try.
And now the biggest thing I have learned from Facebook: I'm not all that and a bag of chips, either. I've tried a few things - failed at some and succeeded at others. Nothing I've done is going to live long after me but my kids, and I've been realizing that I wasn't any great shakes as a dad, either. When a hundred years have gone by nobody is going to remember or care who the popular kids or the outcasts were in my high school back in the 70s. While I may have "a few words" that I'd like to say to some of my classmates - but won't. I like to think I'm smart enough not to try - I'm betting that there is more than one or two of them that would like to have a few words with ME that would be just as humbling. You see, I'm just as mediocre as any of them and maybe, just maybe - that's the best thing I could have gotten from all this technology. A good clear look at myself as I really am. It's humbling, but it's also encouraging. Now I have to resolve to see the reality and treat it for what it is: a wake up call. I still have things I want to do, mountains to cross and dragons to slay. I'm not done on this planet yet, and it's time to get moving. Halftime is over, and the second half is about to start....
Hey, if I do it right, they >might< just remember me after all.
