These People That I Love

Facebook is another tragic reminder of how short life is.

I mean, I'm glad it exists, I'm glad I'm able to keep in touch with friends from South Africa and Paris and Australia that, honestly, 20 years ago I'd have never really had the opportunity to regularly communicate with. Technology has certainly made our world smaller.

Though one has to admit that, in spite of the world's shrinking, we've now enabled ourselves to live our petty little isolated lives in an even more menial capacity, while using facebook to fool ourselves into thinking we're more important than we really are. We can have 4000 "friends" online and yet still spend a birthday or an evening totally and utterly alone, with not but the buzz of a cell phone or the blink of a computer screen to keep us company.  And it's tragic that now we can waste away an evening in an imaginary community online rather than in the imaginary community of Gopher Prairie or Arnette, Texas. There would probably be better and more real company in those places than there would be on a social networking site.

But lately, my mind has been turned to the friendships that are represented by facebook, and how despite the fact that these are really my friends and that I actually do care about them, most of those relationships will never be able to develop deeply because of location, because of time constraints, because of the pursuit of money to survive, because of realism and so many other things that prevent the kind of deep, intimate friendships that I truly believe my friends deserve.

Now whenever I log onto facebook or myspace or friendster or orkot or whatever the blankety blank it is this week, I see these people that I love, most of whom will never be given or will never feel the love that they deserve to feel, will never really know how important/special/awesome they must be in order for me to consider them my friend, simply because I don't have the time to go around making everyone my best friend.

And no one does. Because time is so short.

Like Bill Watterson said, this life is fragile, precious and temporary, and in order to go along with our lives we can't really sit and realize exactly how that is or what that means.

I suppose if time is so short, you have to do all you can with it. There is absolutely none to waste and not nearly enough to do all that you want to do.

This thought is unfinished, but I think it's obvious why. Because life is too short.