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Though high school wasn't the happiest time of my life, I always looked forward to our ten-year class reunion, when we would be all grown up and hopefully over our teen angst and immaturity (believe me, I know I had my share of both), and could come back together and see how each other's lives had developed, and possibly form new, adult friendships with people we might not have had much in common with as teenagers. Even though I wasn't very social back then, there were a lot of people I silently respected and I always hoped for the best for them. I looked forward to seeing how far they'd come, as well as sharing what I'd accomplished in my life. But as it turns out, two years ago when it was time for that reunion, I wasn't able to go. I was sad to have missed out on that opportunity to reconnect.
Well, I no longer feel like missing that reunion was such a bad thing. The reason? Social networking. A lot of my geeky, intellectual friends have expressed rather negative opinions about social networking in the past, and I do agree with their objections to the way many people use social networks. For some people, the object is to have as high a friend count as possible, and they will friend anyone they meet online, regardless of whether they ever intend to have a meaningful, real life relationship with that person. And that, to me, is stupid. But what I find sites like MySpace and Facebook useful for, is as a way to share, stay in touch, and reconnect with people I actually know. These sites have proven to be infinitely more useful in finding and reconnecting with old classmates than school reunion sites like Classmates and Reunion.com. In fact, I don't know how those sites stay in business, considering they charge for that which the social networks provide for free.
I do much prefer Facebook to MySpace. MySpace and I had kind of a falling out a few months ago, when they deleted my account and refused to tell me why. I hadn't violated any rules - in fact I hadn't even logged in recently - and if someone else had compromised my account and used it to violate their policies, the responsible thing would be to make me aware of this, so that I could make sure that other accounts which used the same password would not be compromised as well. But they refused to give me any explanation, only repeatedly telling me that account deletions are final and cannot be disputed. So that's when I went running to Facebook, and never once looked back. Sure, I recreated my MySpace account, and re-added as many of my friends as I could remember and find. But only for the purpose of letting them know what MySpace had done to me, and that they could find me on Facebook or here on confoozled.com if they still wanted to correspond. Facebook is so much more fun, and applications mean endless features. Best of all, Facebook doesn't allow people who should never be allowed to design anything, to make their profiles slow, illegible, and obnoxious (seriously, making someone's computer play music or video without their permission is never cool)... because they don't let you edit or embed any HTML.
But back to my original point... I've found a lot of my old high school classmates recently, thanks mostly to Facebook. And that makes getting to those reunions seem a lot less important. Plus, judging from how spread out across the country we are, I have a feeling a lot of these people didn't get to the ten-year reunion. In fact, there are so many of us on the east coast, I'm thinking an east coast reunion might be in order! It's a trip seeing what people have done for careers, too. We have nurses, doctors, lawyers, scientists, programmers, teachers... and me, the blogging secretary! 
(Just kidding, I am happy with my career choice. A curse on those who tell me I shouldn't be.)
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comment: from Grandy
Well I think that you have a pretty fun looking blog here, so that gives ya one up on all those canoodle-heads from high school.
Sat 04/26/2008 8:18 PM
comment: from Connie
You're not a blog secretary but an online writer or professional blogger! You're doing just fine and if they don't think so, too bad. They're not worth it.
Sat 04/26/2008 11:21 PM
comment: from HelloKit
@Connie: No, no... blogging doesn't pay the bills for me. I earn my living as a secretary; that's why I referred to myself as a blogging secretary. And just to be clear, no one I went to school with has ever put down my choices. There are other people, though, who tell me what a shame it is that I never went to college. Those are the people I want to punch in the gut. 
Sun 04/27/2008 8:04 AM
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