Revelations Through FaceBook

I wrote Stephanie this week about how I’ve shifted my normal closed book nature as it pertains to my life. Prior to that plane ride into this land of the rising sun I kept a few journals but all have been private. They are inside one of the eleven boxes back in my father’s basement that hold the collected pieces of what I’ve chosen to keep. Over the music and films, the journals will stay. Sometimes a man needs to chronicle his existence for future generations whether they choose to read them or not. I envision my daughter one day discovering a box in a dusty, cobweb infested attic somewhere and unearthing these books of her father’s life…and using them as something to prop up the coffee table with until she’s about 80 and actually finds out what they really are. However this last year I’ve been on public display like a museum exhibit with this journal and over on Facebook. Though this journal was intended to be for the eyes of friend’s and family there have been visitors from all over the globe. They arrive daily usually via a Google search. Some have even added me to their bookmarks. Amazing what an online blog tracker can tell you, huh? Oh, on that note, and following suit from Mog, how goes things up in Nagoya? Anywho, what I’m driving at is that when you’re an open book to the online masses you can’t expect people to not pick you up and thus comes those who have managed to track me down via Facebook. Some are welcome and others I’d prefer to remain a Claude Raines in their world. The latter are few, however, and are promptly blocked and never need be seen again. For the most part I’ve enjoyed rekindling old friendships and learning what paths others have taken. Some were expected and others were great surprises. Some will now remain in my life forever and others will just fade off into the night as they had before maybe to float back in in another decade. Of those great surprises, one of the largest was revealed this week and it wasn’t by any one person but by a group of people, a few whom I still do not quite recall exactly. You see, of all the times in my life, the one that is the most hazy is my first stint in college…back when I had huge aspirations to be Canada’s next great journalist. I don’t think I’ve shut things out because the memories were bad, per say, though my two years spent living in a dormitory is willing buried, but they were shut out, dimmed and buried because sometimes life needs to make room in the mind for more life. A week ago I met an old friend. This has become a bi-weekly occurrence since joining Facebook but this was only the second from that college period of my life and he was one of three that I actually still remembered. On Facebook it takes one person to open the gates and through his account I not only discovered that there were other people from the journalism days online but there was also a specific group set up for us. I joined. People started writing me. I didn’t know who they were. I pretended to know who they were. It’s the internet. You can do things like that and get away with it cleaner then you might in the real world. The other person I remember was there, though, although after writing her I feel the memory of me is not as sharp. What goes around, I suppose. Okay, so the revelation part I’ve been driving this post towards. Of all the people on Facebook that I went to college with, all that graduated from the journalism program just like me, also just like me, are not working in the field. In fact, some never managed to find a gig in the field. Learning this made feel a little better for not making much of those two years of college aside from a debt I am still trying to pay off. I wasn’t alone in what suddenly became a much bigger boat. Yet, I started wondering why this was and, honestly, I still have no answers. Was it the program not supplying us with the right tools needed to get into the business? Was it the shitty job market and lack of work? Or was it that most people go to college to fill a void created in their twenties after nearly two decades of schooling and that such people are basically using the educational system as a way to kill time. I think of an ex-girlfriend of mine who didn’t go to college or university after highschool. She continued working in retail. By her mid-twenties she was the manager of the largest Chapters store in downtown Toronto, had traveled and owned her own house and car…and two cats named after Star Wars characters. Still, I don’t look back so badly on my time in journalism with a bitter face. If not for those years I would not have been put on the path to film production and though that road is still being paved, and a bumpy one it has been, after over five years I am still driving it which tends to tell me that that is the direction I should be heading in. Or is it? Damn it, the 30s are so confusing and I’m only three months in! To close, I haven’t really given up on journalism. During my two years in Ottawa I freelanced a few articles here and there and every once and awhile I scan the online jobsites for gigs. It has become a net to fall back on, there’s a few of them now, should the road I’m currently on lead to a dead-end. As for my Facebook friends, it’s nice to see that their journeys have not been wrought with too much damage and they’ve found partial happiness in other jobs, as husbands and fathers, mothers and wives. Me? Right now? I’ve going to find happiness in a cup of coffee and a box of Japanese pastries. Sometimes all you need are the little things.