I smell revolution

My friend Kiah got me started on Myspace.com, and I'm not sure if I should thank her or fall on my knees sobbing, or what. Because whatever life I had...d'you hear it?...just went out the window.

Here's the funny thing about Myspace--you can find tons of people. People you'd forgotten about, or been trying to forget about, or perhaps had been searching for, desperately. Take my friend, Lyle--good buddies, kept in touch for a bit, moved, moved again, boom! Haven't talked in two years. Haven't seen each other in four. Hop on Myspace, look up kids in my graduating class, and wham! There he is. And he's in town for a month (he lives in Japan, now). I had lunch with him yesterday and everything.

But no, this is not a commercial.

The mixed blessing of Myspace is that you start to want friends, badly. You also become terrified, thinking of the kids you knew from high school who are embarrassingly unchanged, whose photos look the same, whose bios read like those of angsty high school sophomores, and you start praying, pathetically, that you're at least a fraction cooler than you used to be. That when people happen upon your profile they say, Wow, that Thea! Look at all the fascinating stuff she's been up to! Oh, and she's lookin' foxy!

I know. I'm embarrassing myself, just admitting this.

But the worst are people who really are doing cool things, and who look great, and I'm so happy for them in that shallow "wow, your life looks great on paper" sort of way, but I'm also stabbing at the keyboard rather aggressively as I tell them so, and hoping that my feeble life looks great on paper, too.

I have to remind myself, periodically, that I adore my life right now. Forget Myspace.

Oh, but I keep going back, checking every few minutes to see if anybody's found me, if anybody wants to be my friend--so far, I've gotten an invitation from a sci-fi site (how they found me, I don't know) and a bench. An honest-to-goodness park bench. Go figure.