Cyber Stalking and Virtual Reunions

The pop-culture phenomenon known as MySpace is many things to many people. It’s a meeting place, a meat market, a sounding board, a billboard, a free commercial, a political forum and even a news reporting tool (I swear this is why I initially signed on).
Everyone who’s anyone has a MySpace page. Movie stars, rock stars, wanna-be stars, has-beens, would-bes and presidential hopefuls.

Every band from Bon Jovi (member since December 29, 2004) to the world’s greatest band ever, U2 (member since August 20, 2004), have MySpace pages. (Of course, U2 has 1.4 million “friends” while Bon Jovi only has about 98,000.)

Comedian Dane Cook has a page. So does “21 Jump Street” heartthrob turned Oscar nominated actor Johnny Depp (who by the way, has 13 tattoos – I’d love to see every one of them up close). And nowadays you can’t leave a movie theater without being bombarded with MySpace addresses for the next blockbuster.

Hillary Clinton 2008, no doubt trying to Rock the Youth Vote, has laid out her platform for the virgin voters. You can even buy campaign paraphernalia like an adorable figure-flattering pink and white baseball shirt and “Hillary the First Lady President 2008” button. (More on this in a future blog.) Yes, Barack Obama has one, too. If MySpace “friends” are any indication of who between the two will secure the Democratic nomination, Barack is blowing Hillary away with 32,326 cyber friends to her 19,666 as of this writing.

You see MySpace is everyone’s space. It’s one big cyber party.

But MySpace is also something more for the older, lesser known crowd. It’s a reunion.
I admit since signing on for the first time last year, I’ve become a bit of cyber stalker, lost on the site’s pages for hours at a time. (Remember, the first step is admitting the problem.) I, of course, don’t use it anything like the youth of today do. With the simple click of the mouse, they set up their “top friends” allowing them to quickly shun whoever they fought with last in the school hallway or give a shout out to their BFF of the moment, as well as proclaim their love for the object of their desire au jour. It’s sort of how us children of the 80s used note-passing, friendship pins and cassette mix tapes all at once.

Now, I troll the pages searching for former schoolmates. That's what I was doing when I bumped into an old friend a few weeks ago.

I clicked this guy Russ’ page. He’s a little older than me but I kinda remember him. So there I was spying on his list of friends and there he was: Todd Evans, the brother of one of my best buddies from high school. My heart sunk. Meredith and I had lost touch a couple of years ago. Though our relationship had been nearly reduced to Christmas Card Buddies, I was devastated a couple of holiday seasons ago when my card went unanswered. If Mere didn’t send a card, she always, always called around the holidays. And always we fell into a conversation that felt like we had talked the day before.

She was the kind of friend who you'd duck into a bathroom with at a high school or college party to have a deep, drunken conversation. It always went something like this: “Dude, I love you. You’re the best. You’re going to be in my wedding.”

The first time we lost touch was when my wedding invitation went unanswered. (She never got it because she moved from Seattle.) Shortly after I got hitched to the love of my life she called. Shaken, she told me she just found out I was married and she was sorry she missed the Big Day.

More than a decade later, I couldn’t find her again until I stumbled upon her brother. I sent him a message through MySpace and two weeks later he sent me Meredith’s phone number. She's getting married, he wrote.

I left Meredith a voice mail Saturday. She called me Monday. It was like we talked the day before. Her wedding is June 19th. I’m going make darn sure I’m there to see her say “I do.” Drunken Bathroom Conferences between girls are just as binding as pinkie swearing.
See, MySpace ain’t that evil.