Woof. Been a while.

I'm ashamed to say I don't even really have a good reason for not blogging to this blog in so long. It's gotten a little blurry, what goes to the main blog and what goes here... and furthermore, I just haven't felt much like writing anything particularly deep. Either this means I've been too depressed, or just not depressed enough--probably depends on the day. At any rate, I'm not quite prepared to kill this blog yet, though I know that only approximately 2 people read it even when I am posting. I still need a place to vent and moan.

The bizarre event of the last week involves the death of a high school classmate--not one I'd kept in touch with, and not one I'd ever been particularly close to--unlike last year at this time, when Paul's death by overdose rocked my world rather a bit. But the thing is, when you go to a school of only a few hundred people, and it's a K-12, you're inevitably friends with everyone. There are cliques and anger and bad feelings and meanness--but there's not a lot of room for it to go very deeply. The cliquish girls in middle school were all the same people I'd been in girl scouts with for 6 years of grade school. The boys on the football team were also the boys in band/orchestra with me, who were also the boys I'd played kickball with on the playground in second grade. So really, I don't hold hard feelings about anyone in particular from school, and I was sorry to hear that he'd died.

What kind of got me thinking--and this happened with Paul as well--was when I started poking around Facebook after I'd heard he died, and I found his page. Facebook pages are this kind of strange limboesque thing. It's not a memorial to him; but until someone takes that facebook page down, he's still alive in a meta internet sense. You look at his profile, and it tells you all the things he IS doing--not WAS doing, but IS still doing, frozen in time until the page gets removed or edited. Which it may never be, if no one has his password. I presume Facebook has some way of dealing with removing pages of the deceased by request of the family... With Paul it was particularly disturbing, as I was able to read all of his recent blog posts on MySpace, particularly the ones about having beaten his heroin addiction and how excited he was to be starting his life over. Sucks to read something like that when you already know how the book ends, so to speak.

Anyway. It just struck me as an odd and unforeseen facet of the internet age, with its endless caches of pages and free social networking/hosting sites, that people will continue to have a sort of ghostly virtual existence for months or years after they auger on. Frankly, it kind of gives me the willies.