In which I berate techonological progress

Dont get me wrong I am a slave to technology - laptops, mice, Youtube, Joost, Hulu, GPS, iPods, Guitar Hero. Chances are if i can afford them I will have them. It was in this spirit of being technology's slave-girl that I got an Orkut and Facebook account and signed up for Gmail chat. The honeymoon was great, I loved the way I could keep in touch with my friends on Gmail chat or with scraps (micromail for the attention span challenged) just to remind friends that I am around. I loved the potential for getting back in touch with childhood friends.

This followed a period where I aggressively searched for long lost neighbours from my childhood home and in the process met random people from school who were 8 when I was 14. Once I even made this very heart rending post, where I asked to know of my school friends whom I had lost touch with. The upside to that was thanks to a combination of that post, Facebook and Orkut, I am now very definitely in touch with them.

In fact, I now know whats on the mind of as much as 6 people before breakfast (via status messages on Gmail chat, facebook and orkut) impossible as it may seem.Some of them even have blogs to further subject me to their thoughts and actions during the course of the day, week, year. (Oh wait...!) Not that I am close to any of them. Most of them I have met once maybe twice, few have something stimulating to say and almost all of them have sent friendship requests when I was in a benevolent mood.

Subject to this much barrage of information of who is getting married, who had kids, who moved to Australia, who is going to a certain hemisphere, who got a job and where, who crashed a car while learning to drive, who is making pasta for dinner, who hated sky diving and who is bored, I am losing my sangfroid. Schadenfreude anyone?

Earlier it was all hail-fellow-well-met and then a vacuum which you really only bothered to fill if you had a crush on that person in question but now even the Facebook updates from my highschool crush are a chore to read as he hops from one debauched Dubai party to another. Sometimes I just wants to disappear into a technological rabbit hole of obscurity and emerge in a few decades and then seek out Nisha, Vikas, Ann, V., A., B., W., and the other endearing letters of the alphabet.

Several times I have come this close to deleting my accounts but the addiction persists! I am cursed to live out my life in this Kalyug where friendships after the actual physical proximity criteria is eliminated go from email exchanges, to Facebook wall messages to Orkut scraps to Gchat status messages and finally hang on with the claws of Facebook updates. Welcome to eternal damnation where friendships don't gracefully melt into obscurity but are well and truly forever.