osodecanela | Resistance is futile....

I don't do Facebook, or at least, I didn't.

No, I'm not going to depart LiveJournal as so many have, but I've seen within the past few months the utility of Facebook or at least, glimpsed it.

Previously, it felt kinda creepily invasive. I resisted using it. I had a personal page, which I hadn't & still haven't been to in years, and despite that I still regularly get emails from Facebook about friend requests, more often than not from folks I don't know. My office staff built a page for my practice. I still never logged onto it.

In September, after shutting the doors of my practice, I was faced with how do I get rid of its contents, at least of the things I wanted to divest myself of. Craigslist was somewhat useful, but the messages that came from very distant parts of the country wanting to send cashier checks for items with "generous allowances for shipping" that I was supposed to arrange for was annoying. Craigslist had a page warning about fraudulent buyers, but it's easy to miss. If you get suckered in, and cash a forged cashiers check, you're libel for it. My ads were all labeled local pick up only; didn't stop them from trying. With all the stuff I had to do, I didn't need to sort through that crap as well.

A truly wonderful patient told me about and then walked me through joining and using a moderated group on Facebook for buying and selling stuff locally. It was really helpful, plus I met some very nice folks.

This may sound odd, but I ended up with some follow up pictures from people who bought stuff, showing me where stuff I sold ended up. Mostly it was artwork that had been hanging in the office. Still on an emotional level it was helpful to me, an aid in moving on and closing a very major chapter of my life. It seems strange to have an emotional attachment to inanimate objects that should not have been as important as they were, but it was a piece of the catharsis, and Facebook helped enable that.

I'm sitting on the side of the bed, my husband asleep next to me, in the upstairs bedroom at Mom's. We arrived a week ago for my nephew's wedding and in a few hours we'll be up prepping for the Thanksgiving feast at my sister's. I'm really glad we're here. Just before I folded last night, Mom was at the kitchen table on her iPad, going through he Facebook feed, and asked my help to help her save a video from the feed onto her pad. I wasn't successful. A) I may have an iPhone 6+, but I've never had an iPad. B) Mom's iPad is an old one and C) I'm not all that savvy on the ins and outs of Facebook. Had I had my computer I might've succeeded in figuring out how. I'm traveling light this trip and my iPhone is my only internet access with me. There were tons of pictures from my nephew's wedding on mom's feed, many of them shots I want myself.

Now I am a sucker for engagement photos and videos especially for the LGBT community. For those of who knew the closeted pain of the love that dare not speak its name, this open celebration of the joy of finding one's love in life gets me misty pretty damned reliably. Honestly, seeing anyone, LGBT or not, celebrating their love does it, which brings me finally full circle to why I started tapping away at the post 1/2 an hour ago.

My nephew and his bride have been involved with each other since they were 15. He turned 29 on their wedding night. I don't have enough superlatives to describe my niece. She's wonderful! My entire family adores her. More importantly, so does he and she him. I've said for at least the past 5 years, "if my nephew's smart, he'll put a ring on it."

The wedding took place at the boat house in Central Park. The pre-nuptial photo shoot was gorgeous, but the photographer's very last picture was the best & that was on mom's Facebook feed last night with the backstory attached. It's a tableau shot of the whole bridal party out in the park, clearly assembled for this group shot around the bride and groom. Just as the final shots were being taken, a guy a few feet to the side of the photographer fell to his knee and proposed to his girlfriend, who said yes. The spontaneous abject joy on the faces of every one in my nephew's wedding party at witnessing off screen this other couple's proposal was sublime. (I will post the photo here once I get home. It's priceless.)

Had I not been looking at mom's Facebook feed I would have missed this photo as well as the backstory.