discover fire

As a child I hated this time of year. Family and friends had provided me with some material Christmas goodies, New Year’s meant school was about to start again, and my thank you cards remained unwritten. Not a very difficult choice for me as a young boy. I could read about elves and dwarves kicking evil orc ass, play Yar’s Revenge on my Atari, watch the end of year continuous marathon of black-and-white Twilight Zones, or take a couple of hours to write Thank You cards.

Me totally ungrateful? Not in thought, although in action…. My Thank You cards usually arrived around Valentines day on a good year.

Now today, I have so many options. Given that story, you’d think someone like me would like the simplicity of facebook and MySpace. Such an easy way to automate life, no? Exhibit A: the SuperPoke application. All I have to do is load the application into my facebook profile and scroll down to it.

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Click on the “Mass Poke!” link in the upper left and bring up the giant potential poking list.

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It’s so easy to be in the Christmas spirit, and since all of my friends really are my friends on social networking sites, I’ll simply click that glowing red “Select All” button and scroll down to the many different canned messages.

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SuperPoke you’re my hero! So many choices you offer me to truly communicate. You even offer me the option to thank all of my friends with the push of a button. Were I to be less coherent, nay even doing some uninhibited drunken surfing (oh no, I never do things like that), the greatest idea of the moment might be to “have a spot of tea” with my entire social circle. But no, this is Christmas, it’s the time of year to slam those Thank Yous out through my computer port and move on with my life.

I deleted SuperPoke and returned my facebook profile to it’s former naked plainness.

Something must have changed in my lifelong search for simplicity where everything could be magically accomplished by double-clicking on, “Yes, please send out my Thank You form letter.” Never able to get enough of what I don’t really want? Probably. Growing up and maturing and finding out what’s really important? EEEK! The M-word, but yeah, that’s closer to it.

I’m going back to card and letter writing, on that cardstock and paper stuff for some messages. Heck, any of you guys want a card or a letter, let me know. Why? Just because.