Facebooked

I thought Facebook was just a vehicle for savage preteen girls to drive unpopular classmates to suicide, so I’ve been surprised in the last few days to receive a few invitations to be someone’s friend. As I recall, the last adult person to actually ask me to be his/her friend was a transgendered student at OIT who had just made the switch from him to her and who thought we had a lot in common. I said I thought it was important to maintain a strictly professional relationship with my students. I got enough problems.

BTW, the new Atlantic has an excellent and rather sad article on transgendered kids and the changing views about how to raise and relate to them. Talk about people with enough problems.

It turns out some of my old friends from jazz-l are Facebooking, and when I said yes to one, a few others invited me over. Some have even said they follow my blog, which is great to hear because I only know of about five people who follow my blog: me, my wife (I give quizzes), a couple of buddies, and a woman in Iceland who occasionally sends me an email comment. For some reason, I keep trying to configure the blog so it’s easier to leave comments, but it keeps reverting to default mode which requires secret handshakes. I do get the occasional email, though.

I have no idea how Facebook works, so I guess I’ll have to create a profile and hang around a little. The only other online community I belong to is Livemocha, which is a language learning site. It has exercises that work a lot like Rosetta Stone, from what I’ve seen of both, but Livemocha is free. You can also make friends with people all over the world, so I can write in Spanish to native speakers and they write back in English to me. I’ve just re-registered after being away for awhile, so I don’t actually have any friends yet. I tend to favor Latin hotties.

I haven’t been part of jazz-l for some years now, but at one time it was a big part of my life. It’s good to see some of the regulars are still around, and now I can put a Face with the name.