And here we all are...

I have spent an enormous amount of time wasting my life sitting in this solitary chair doing little more but wonder what else I can look up here online.  I'm sure it is no surprise to know that I spend a fair amount of my time on Facebook.  Some of it is for the promoting of my shit, but mostly I just follow posts and look up articles that others post.

Occasionally I will get to wondering about someone on there that I have not actually seen in years and for the most part I had just dismissed them from my life as a person related to a time that has passed.  I think that is the beauty of the Facebook... You move on from one job to the next and eventually you barely recall the names, much-less faces of those you one worked with years ago in those jobs you had when you were just trying to get by.  Or maybe they were someone you would chat with in a class, though you never met outside of the occasional random coincidental meeting.  Either way, these are the people you easily dismissed from memory as you make new ones worth recalling from time to time.  These people find you on facebook, and now you have a connection again with them that seems to last.

Though it is simply a fine, thread like connection compared to your current, stronger connections, you now have a small window into the life of a person you would never have ever remembered for the remaining years of your life only a decade ago.  It's like the ghosts of your past have a way to reach you, and though most of the time the most interaction we may have with one another is a click on a "like" button on a picture or status update, it is still a tangible connection even if so slight.

But it really is just a glimpse.  These people get married and have children, and if you happen to miss the post about these items, you miss out.  You eventually notice they have children in their profile pictures.  Then you see that there may be a new person in the pics, but did they post that they went through a divorce?  And then one day they just aren't posting anymore.  Do you notice?  What happened to them?  They could have died in a car accident or suicide, but if you missed the post about it, you don't know.

And then, these ghosts of your past fade away.  Finally, after such an extended time of unnatural connection, you can finally be free of these people.  You may at some occasion wonder what happened to them if you meander through your "friends" list and see that their account is no longer active, or you may just click on the link if you have not seen their posts in a while only to find that their timeline had been abandoned some time ago.  But don't worry... there will always be more ghosts of your past that will keep on posting pics of their life that you could likely not care about.