More Friends, December 2006

I may need more friends.  I get enough holiday cards and can usually find someone to talk to, but I feel that I am somehow missing out.  I made a few friends growing up, then some more in college, and then many special people when I lived and worked in the Minneapolis community.  The problem is I met most of my dear friends before the Internet explosion.  They are a fine, loyal, and irreverent lot and certainly better than I deserve, but I do not think my circle is providing me with a full range of the spectrum of e-mail attachments.

I am receiving some of the very clever anti-Bush cartoons from my politically active friends, and I do get many of the signage photos like “Bridge Out Slow to 60” from my sardonic peers.   Still I see the stuff being passed via You Tube by admittedly younger, hipper acquaintances and my friends are just light-years behind.  Granted I do not even know how to copy an attachment to send to twenty people, but when I was making life-long friends, who knew the ability to cull interesting snippets from cyberspace would be soimportant?

Every day I get countless Rogaine and Viagra ads (which JoAnne claims she has nothing to do with) dumped in my in box.  Between that and the insipid quasi-personal notes from someone named Martinique or Gladys that say “Let’s get back in touch”  it is rare to receive an attachment picturing a bulldozer sinking in a swamp.  I like hearing how my friends are doing, but the photo collage sequence of Madonna morphing into Mick Jagger is what you buy a computer for.  My friends are pretty good about finding the photos of a long line of traffic brought to a stand-still by three turtles trudging across the highway, but they are not finding the edgier stuff.

David Brooks wrote a particularly humorous Shouts and Murmurs piece in The New Yorker recently about E-name dropping and status.  Brooks clued me into noticing the other recipients who receive the same correspondence.  Since most people do not use blind copy, you can see who else is receiving it.  I tend to get lumped with grandparents and obscure relatives.  Still, the next time I write to others I may borrow his idea and subtly pad my list of other recipients like bdylan@columbiarec.org and bgates@microsoft.com.  Perhaps if my few remaining friends see they are in the company of nmailer@randomhouse.org, kannan@UN.org hberry@tristarpictures.net, and gclooney@warnerbros.com they will send me better stuff.

Tom H. Cook is planning to go on assignment for The Hill and Lake Press to New Zealand to see if the toilets do flush counterclockwis