I don't think that there has ever been a longer hiatus for this blog ... but I'm back ... .

Have to admit that I was temporarily seduced by Facebook, but the love affair seems to have ended, though I'll surely visit from time to time.

It seems to me that I was fitting my life and my self into someone else's format and it gradually lost its charm.  At first I felt in control of that world that -- for a while there  -- I thought that I was creating.  It was peopled by friends and family but gradually that illusion gave way to one in which it took far more dedication from me to maintain any semblance of order.  I just don't think that I want to be programmed in the way that the new social networks tend to demand.  And the time it would take to tailor the program to my personal needs just wasn't available, or maybe I just didn't want to invest that time.  Besides that, it didn't feel good to realize that I'd become fodder for the data-miners.  (Or is anyone else receiving announcements for hip replacements, cataract removal, scooters, and burial sites with a view?)

While there was a noticeable increase in contacts with family members and friends whom I rarely run across in the course of my days, there was a far greater increase in names who were (I'm sure) friends of friends -- all lovely folks, but with whom I shared little in common.  Besides, it felt strange and mean to unfriend anyone who'd invited me into their circle.  It just got unwieldy and awkward, finally.  

Besides that, LinkEd somehow got my work email address and there are so many invitations to join my friends in that social network that I began to feel stalked!  

My blogging had become so much a part of the way I was processing time as it went by -- my chance to delve more deeply into day-to-day experiences of living -- with no limits; no rules; no boundaries except for those self-imposed.   Blogging serves my purposes -- that of leaving a record of my extraordinary ordinary existence for my children to ponder after I'm gone.  FB can't achieve that goal.  Such networks require immediacy.  They're now!  They're not for the reflective.  In a rather peculiar way, they tend to stress the throwaway culture that we've grown into.  Hit and run!  No "do-overs."

I suppose it was "just one of those things", as Cole Porter would have said.


... but then maybe age has given me a better way to measure meaning.

I'm back.