An ode to Facebook

There are few applications that I feel have changed my life - Gmail is one, and MS Money is another (does that make me a complete geek?) Facebook is definitely a close third.

I was a grudging adopter of Facebook at first. Social networking sites have been around for a while, and I've managed to stay detached from them all, despite emotional pleas from my friends. Friendster, MySpace, Naseeb - all have come (and in my opinion, gone). But there was something elegant about the simplicity of Facebook that drew me from the start. It wasn't gimmicky, and it wasn't a place dedicated to online firtation. That, and the fact that within days of creating an account, I was in touch with people from all over the planet, some of whom I had not seen in almost twenty years - both helped to make me a big fan of the site.

So why mention Facebook while I sit blogging in London? Well, it is because of this website that today I met up with an old friend of mine from grade school in Spain. We had discovered each other online, and on a whim I shot him a message to see if he would be around while I was here. Sure enough he was, and we picked today afternoon to meet for lunch.

I found the pre-meeting anxiety comical. I took extra care picking out my wardrobe for the day, and of grooming my increasingly sparse hair (it's a good thing Saeeda was not around, because she would undoubtedly have felt a twinge of jealousy.) The train ride into the city from my sister's house was uneventful, probably because I kept my mind occupied with reading material, but before I knew it, I was standing in front of the ticket counter at the Bond Street tube station, anxiously sifting through the strange faces milling around me as I tried to strike as non-chalant a pose as possible. Would I be able to pick out James from the crowd? I hadn't seen him since 1991, and he didn't have that many pictures up on Facebook.

But there he was. Bearded, wearing glasses, and a lot taller than I remember him, but James nonetheless. With pleasantries exchanged, and the requisite repetitions of "@%£$ man, how the hell are you?" out of the way, we walked over to a corner cafe near Christopher Square, and away from the maddening crowds of Oxford St.

There are few things in life more epiphanous than reviewing your past with an old friend, because you come face-to-face with someone who knew you when you were a completely different person. Through the reminescing, you are able to review the different paths that your lives have taken, and you learn a tiny bit more about that most confusing person in the world - you. And reminesce we did.

We talked about old teachers, places, and most importantly, old friends. There were stories of sheer tragedy - the friend who turned his brain to mush on an overdose of drugs; the friend who lost his mother to cancer and his father to financial ruin; and the intelligent friend who hit some bumps along the way, and is now stuck in a no-hope situation in the middle of nowhere. But there were also stories of great success - of friends who were never going to amount to much, but are now raking in the millions on the European race car circuit (!); of friends who completed their PhD's in engineering and are pursuing successful careers in Spain; and of friends who settled down continents away, and are married to the people they love, with children that they adore.

Time flew by, and I was struck by how lives for our children are going to be different from those of my parents and those of ours. My parents speak nostalgically of childhood friends that went their separate ways and are now only vague memories. In contrast I can reconnect periodically with my old acquaintances using applications such as Facebook. Will our children ever have a valid excuse to fall out of touch with their friends? Will social networking sites make it impossible for them to say they don't know what someone is up to these days?

Seeing James was one of the highlights of my stay in London, even though I've only been here two days. Experiences such as these are invaluable, since they allow you to circle back on your life and strengthen the delicate bonds that are always at risk of snapping. Hopefully we'll stay in better contact from here, and hopefully there will be others that I will reconnect with in the future. For making this happen, I thank you Facebook.

(PS, the picture at the top is from when I was in Spain, and was around twelve years old. James is in the blue shirt in the back row, and I'm two to his left).