face the nation

Yeah, yeah, we know...we've been gone forever.  Whaddya want? We're here now.

We're a little busy tonight.  Or rather we should be.  We're supposed to be packing to go to DC tomorrow.  We're heading down so that we, or at Jennifer, can watch her sister Claire graduate from high school.  It's still absolutely amazing to Jennifer that her sisters, who she thinks should still be small little children, are old enough to do things like drive and graduate.

Anyway, here's the point we wanted to share tonight.  A short while ago, Jennifer's brother sort of talked her into getting a facebook account.  He's part of that generation, is it Y or Z now?  Or are we back around to A?...anyway, he's part of that generation for whom email is way to stodgy, and IM is just not expressive enough, that they communicate through things that are soooo "Web 2.0"...like facebook.

Now, Jennifer considers herself pretty up with the various technological communication trends....after all, not only does she have a blog, she has several, and her cats have their own.  She's really trying to understand the whole "social network" thing.  She signed up, answered some relatively personal questions like which shade of purple she likes best...next thing she knows 2 things are happening.  First, people she hasn't seen or heard from since high school suddenly want to be her "friend."  Given how little Jennifer enjoyed high school, or most of the people with whom she attended it, this wasn't exactly a good thing.  Also, people started doing things like "becoming dekey" with her...and asking her to do the same.  So she threw a sheep at them.  (Seriously.) It will probably turn out that sheep throwing is either horribly offensive or soooo last week or whatever.  But it sounded fun.

We've decided that the real reason that Jennifer doesn't quite get the whole facebook/myspace thing is that it's really not about expressing yourself...at least not in the way we like to express ourselves.  Sure, you can tell everyone what your favorite book is, and make random comments about what you're doing at the moment....but we're all about the pontification around here.  Thus the blogs.

These social networks are also really for the cool kids.  The people who actually were in the cliques in high school, and beyond.  There's something about a site that every time you log in it proclaims "you have N friends" where N < "a lot" and tells you "You have no new friends."   poor jenwinfur.....

But we're going to stick with it... there is just something about the option of throwing sheep that is very appealing.  Not to mention that when you google for "what is a dekey?" it comes back and says "Do you mean what is a donkey?"  That made us laugh.

P.S. Once you understand that it's Canadian slang, eh?, it's not too hard to find out what a dekey is....google really does have all the answers....you just have to ask the right questions.