This morning, our alarm company called us at 5:15 a.m., to “test the system,” according to Matt. He let it ring, but I wanted to pick it up and yell, “Do you know what time it is?!” Once I’m awake, I have a hard time falling back asleep. So while I tried to do so, I cursed the birds loudly chirping outside (it sounded like a hundred of them), but then my thoughts eventually went from praying for Rolly’s family to thinking about friends to myspace. I know the track that my train of thought is on is pretty windy, but there’s some logic to it all…or so I tell myself.

I created a myspace page for Matt and me to keep in contact with the youth at church, who have told us that they communicate with people via myspace even more than they do with their e-mails. That was new to me that people do that nowadays, but I think I’m just behind in the times. After all, I still use the U.S. postal system.

But after creating the page, I looked up old friends and you know how it goes. You go from one profile to another to another, from one familiar face to another. As I began adding more friends, I became a little friend-hungry. Who else can I add? I don’t want to seem unpopular! But as I looked over my collection of friends, I realized that everyone there had some impact on my life, in some form or other. It  also made me think about the paths that each friendship took over the years.

I would say about 25% of the friends that I regularly keep in touch with are on myspace now. And everyone else on our list of friends are people that I have lost touch with or people I contact sporadically, maybe once or twice a year. Some of them are old co-workers, friends from church camp, or friends from home that I grew up with but have not seen in a long time.

I’d like to say that I am good at keeping in contact with people, but I have to admit that I usually end up doing a better job being in touch with some people better than with others. But that’s where myspace comes in handy. It allows me to reconnect with people, but not have that awkwardness of exchanging e-mails and then wondering what else to talk about after all the catching up ends. As impersonal as the little myspace comments can be, it’s good for quick messages that keep two people in touch *just* enough to keep some form of friendship flowing. Just because I’m not in close contact with someone doesn’t mean I still don’t care about them.

Sometimes I miss more communication and interaction with the friends that I’ve rediscovered through myspace. I remember fun times we had together, like taking cheesy portraits with Karen (Don) and cutting the corners of the pictures to make them look like senior pictures. Or visits from the San Jose Alliance camp friends. Or even more recent things like hanging out with the Fit Preg crew. But hey, we all get older, move around and grow apart. But I also am quite content with the close friends that I’ve maintained contact with throughout the years via e-mail, phone, and face-to-face visits. As much as I’ve moved in the past, my close friends have “moved” with me, and I’ve met new ones at my new destinations.

So after thinking about all that, I finally fell back asleep and then woke up when the alarm went off at 6:15 a.m. What a morning!