Facebook

I just remembered a conversation I had with a man who thought that Facebook was completely ridiculous.



Facebook, according to this man, created a superficial illusion that we were in relationships with all these people in our friends list. When I thought about it, well, yeah, he was right. When I looked at my friends list, I found names that I hadn't even talked to before, for example Indonesian artists that I liked and friends from other classes of elementary school whom I was not sure if I remembered or forgot. Upon listening to that man, I deleted people whom I was not familiar with from my friends list.

But later, I realized that probably I would have to delete so many of my Facebook friends since I didn't really know them closely enough. Some of my Facebook friends were friends that I just made. Some other friends were friends that I crossed paths with in one occasion or the other, but lost touch. Through Facebook, I found them back. That made me think of a Javanese thought (Javanese is the ethnic group in which I am a member of) saying that we should always create the tie of brotherhood and try as best as we can not to break that tie, no matter how far time and space have separated us.

I could only hope that I had been creating good ties of brotherhood with people who deserve them -even through Facebook. I would not forget this one experience.
I had an Indonesian professor in Tempe, AZ whose articles I loved reading and those articles became the sources of my research. One time I decided to email her and introduced myself, saying how I liked her article. She replied my e-mail and then the conversation went on and we often chatted on Yahoo messenger. She said that she didn't chat that often and she didn't know why she chose to chat with me (whom she knew nothing about). But she did, and we just kept in touch.

Last year I told her that I would really love to meet her in person. I thought she was a person who loved to create a string of brotherhood/sisterhood, and she said, come to Tempe! Remember, I hadn't met her before and I didn't know what kind of person she was. I decided to jump up on the opportunity and went to Tempe with my husband, stayed at her house for almost a week, and three of us had a BLAST!

If I could pray right now, I would pray that God would show me opportunities to create strings of brotherhood/sisterhood with good people, and I would also pray that the strings would bring goodness, miracles, and more goodness, for them and for me.

Whether you like Facebook or not, hopefully you will like this song.
And you know what, while I was waiting to board the plane to Denver in Atlanta, there was a group (I was very sure it was the same group who sang this song) walking around the airport boarding gates, singing Christmas songs.. Waiting for two hours, my husband and I got our free enjoyment, following this group from one gate to the next. LOL



Well, illusion or not illusion of relationship , Facebook made me laugh, curious, sad, and sometimes made me forget that I have tons of other responsibilities. Ay ay, Facebook junkie!


p.s. To Dr. Merlyna Lim who is in Indonesia right now to get married, wish you happiness ever after with James O'Halloran!
www.merlyna.org
www.jamesoh.net