Patrick Says

I’ve talked before about how Facebook is changing the way we hold on to relationships. Where our parents would meet different people throughout their lives and friends would come and go, Facebook allows you to keep up with people from nearly every part of your life. It’s new and exciting, but sometimes confusing to navigate.

Take, for example, my time in Texas. I lived on-base in the dorms, but I had some friends who lived off-base in Fort Worth apartments. I used to hang with this one couple whom I considered good friends. In fact, the wife of that couple introduced me to my first grown-up girlfriend. (I had a couple girlfriends in high school, but really, they were weak relationships at best.) So, recently, I reconnected with the wife (now moved on to another husband) and she’s on Facebook. It’s cool catching up.

Inevitably, the ex-girlfriend comes up. We gloss over it, but the reality is that she and I met at the wrong time. It was an amazing time. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. But life worked out a different and great way with my wife. But now she (my friend from Texas) has friended the ex on Facebook. I’m a little worried. The ex and I haven’t talked in years. Right before I got married, I attempted to get in touch with her. (Not for a booty call, jerks.) Now the possibility exists that she could contact me. That scares me. And yet, I would really like to talk to her.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Why do we, as humans, try so hard to distance ourselves from the people we get so close to after it goes bad? You’d think we’d work harder to mend those relationships back to a friendship. You invest so much time and effort and then because something doesn’t work out right, you cut it off completely. Seems like a giant waste.

What do you think? How have your relations with your ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends ended? Did you become friends later? Share it in the comments!

Here’s some food for thought. Thirty years from now:

• Linkin Park will be touring, doing state fairs and casinos. They will have some of the original members, but none of those original members will be Mike Shinoda or Chester Bennington.
• Miley Cyrus will record the same album in three different versions: country, pop and ‘international’. She’ll divorce her record producer husband after he sleeps with an ugly woman.
• Lady Gaga, long revered by drag queens, will sign an outrageously large deal to do a show on the Las Vegas strip. Drag queens will rejoice.

Got one of your own? Put it in the comments!

I nearly gave up blogging again the other day.
I know. I’ve had this crisis happen before.

But I was serious this time!

Lately, things have been extremely rough. Moreso than they ever have before. The wife’s health is crap. She’s putting up a good fight, but I know she’s dealing with a great deal of pain and I worry about her holding it all together until she can be fixed. I also worry that after more than a half-dozen GI doctors, is there anyone who can fix her?

There simply has to be. There is no other alternative.

Financially, we were treading water in the summer, but we’re sinking again. It’s worse than it’s ever been there too. I don’t know how much longer I can hold this house. We have a lot of possibilities for relief, but they are several months out. I’ll hold it together as long as I can. I really don’t want to have to change The Oldest’s school mid-year. He doesn’t deserve that. He’s doing so well and loves his school and teacher.

So, that’s me bitching for three or four paragraphs.
I’ll keep blogging as long as I can get some kind of topic together.

On a completely unrelated ( ) topic: “puerto plata dominican republic”
You know what I’m talkin’ about.

So, if you follow this blog, you know I blew NaBloPoMo, the November event where you post every day. I came home, fell soundly asleep at the computer and didn’t wake up until 2am the next day. I couldn’t help it. I was tired.

Which is a shame because they have prizes. Posters, I think some candy, maybe a custom flash drive or something. And one year, I got a poster. So, no prize this year.

Well, in my email today, I get this:

Hey, everybody, how’s it going? I know a lot of people are still posting with gusto every day, but there’s a bunch of you who have had to throw in the towel early. Don’t feel bad, though, the month doesn’t have to be a total loss: you can still go sign up for IComLeavWe! That’s right, International Comment Leaving Week is November 21-28. If you’re not posting daily on your own blog, you can still show your support to the rest of the group by leaving 5 comments on other blogs and returning one comment that’s been left on your site lately. That’s six comments a day for a week.

So, there’s at least one event I can maybe complete. (I know. There’s still NaNoWriMo. Let’s just chalk that up in the FAIL column.)

If I can’t succeed at IComLeavWe, I’m making my own event called MeMayAdSom, which stands for Me May Admin Sometime. The goal is to log into your admin panel and least once a day for three days. W00t!

So, my friend Jessica turned me on about a week ago to a web service called Dropbox. At first, I was like, whatever. But now, I am loving it. So, what is it, you may be asking?

It’s basically a virtual flash drive. You get 2.0GB of storage and you can do with it whatever you want. Then, on any computer, you install the application that maps it to a local drive and BOOM, your files are local and backed up on the cloud. So, say you go to another computer where you can’t install an application. You can access your drive through the web interface.

It’s very cool. I use it to share mp3s with my peoples. I also keep stuff I need to access from different places there. I also back up my Microsoft Money file there, so if my computer dies, I’m covered like Bell TV covers Canada.

So, check it out using this link and give it a whirl. It’s free!