People, Places, and the Upside of "Social Networking"

So I didn't come down off of yesterday's coffee buzz until 3 o'clock in the morning. The upside of this is that I was able to spend some time on Facebook looking up several old friends. I reluctantly joined the social networking world a couple of years ago on myspace. In the interim, I slowly watched as the whole world made a massive shift to Facebook. Earlier this year, I followed suit, but was unclear what had caused such a mass exodus. After slowly getting aquainted with Facebook, I'm really beginning to see why. It has made finding the people in my life that I have lost touch with incredibly easy. In one night, I was reaquainted with 8 people from my past, some of whom I haven't seen or talked to in close to 20 years.

All of this contact has me thinking.

When I look back on my life, I see myself passing through different stages, but I think the term "epoch" is a much better description.

Epoch- "a moment in time chosen as the origin of a particular era."

There are certainly occurences in my life that delineate, rather harshly sometimes, different larger chunks of time. Graduations, for instance, are typical -though slightly benign- examples of these moments. It is better to think about more specific, impactful moments, to describe the onset of an age. For example, the hot summer day that "the" letter came to my house informing me that I was no longer welcomed at the U.W. is a great sampling of such a moment. I didn't realize it at the time, but that was the beginning of my first REAL adventure: Ripon College. Ripon is a small, liberal arts college, and the last place IN THE WORLD I wanted to go to school. I had always dreamed about going to a "Big University" and now that I was no longer welcomed there, I felt I had failed in the most complete sense of the word. Ripon was the consolation prize for losing the big game. Little did I know what an enormous impact this school would have on not only the next four years, but the rest of my life. For it was at this little liberal arts college that I would meet, get to know, and become life-long friends with, some of the best and strangest people on planet Earth; here too, I would recieve a stronger, more meaningful education than I could have ever hoped to get at larger institution.
So, what I would consider to be the first of serveral "epochs" in my life are the "Formative Years" growning up (mostly) in Columbus, Wisconsin. The second would be "The Ripon Period," these are the years that started me down a long, slippery path into the highly bizzare and rich world of people that I can, with a little luck and presumptuousness, call my friends. Along this path I have occasionally taken people for granted, I've forgotten or not got around to calling them , or just managing to let people slip away. I am sorry for this. I realize that life is big, and complex, and difficult to manage. As impersonal as the internet and social-networking sights can potentially be, it's nice to have some way to reach out to the past and hopefully draw a few good people into my present. If you haven't tried it, give it a shot. I'll be posting about many of these moments in time and the people that color them in the future. Maybe I'll even explain exactly how one goes about getting booted out of a prestigious institution like the University of Wisconsin...if nothing else, it makes for a good little story, and why else am I doing this, right? Tune in tomorrow for the details.