Teenager Again

I am trying to come to grips with the Facebook phenomenon.

For those of you who are unaware of Facebook, it's an internet network where you can enter your profile and information about yourself plus photographs, and then connect up with people you know or have known in the past. It seems to be exploding - there are more and more people signing up every day.

I have made connections with lots of people I knew from high school days. On one level, it's really fun to see what they look like now (20 years later) and read about what they are doing.

On another level, it is bringing up all sorts of odd feelings for me. I almost feel like a teenager again when I look at my 'friends' pages and read their messages.

I guess that would be fine, except that I didn't find being a teenager particularly wonderful. High school was reasonably hard in terms of relating to people in our small fishbowl type boarding school. In the 20 years that have elapsed I have grown and matured and become much happier being me.

So it's bizarre to take up again with some of the people I struggled so much with in those years.

I'm not sure that I'm happy with Facebook. I want to ignore it and never look at it again, and put all of that teenage angst behind me. On the other hand I have a bit of an obsessive fascination with seeing all the people from the past.