I love to blog. It's so therpeutic. I realized that other day that if my mom were alive, this is the time of day when I'd give her a call, and we'd sit and chat, so most of the things I write here are what I would talk to her about.
A few months ago, I received an email inviting me to join facebook. I have to be honest, I'm a bit leery about anything that comes to my hotmail address. It is where most of my junk mail comes, and I know I had received facebook invitations there before, but I had just ignored them. I don't know what caused me to join when I did, but it's been so fun.
I went from having one friend back then to 291 now. Mind you, many of them are just people whose names I know from various activities I've been involved in over time, but they all accepted me as their friend, so I must not smell too bad. I have friends from my mission, from high school, even from elementary school on facebook now.
When I took the trip to Utah with Z last March, I was able to connect with friends at BYU and in other areas of the state and meet up with them. I know when people's birthdays are. I can send messages to people and just silly little greetings.
But last week, I may have done the funnest thing of all. I decided that I'd look up how many women there were there by the name of Julie Hess. There were 58! Every one of the Julie Hesses looked like fun, enthusiastic people--the kind of people I want to be acquainted with. So, I spent friend requests to every one of them. From there, I realized that I could create my own group. If you're not acquainted with facebook, anyone can make a group about anything he/she wants to. I entitled my group "It's GREAT to be Julie Hess!" I made it an exclusive group that only people with the name of Julie Hess, now or in the past, could join. Z calls it the "ultimate clique," and laughs while he says it.
At this point, there are ten Julie Hesses from all over the United States--Kansas, Washington D.C., California, Ohio, Massachusetts....
It's been funny to contemplate that each of these women is called the same thing I am everyday. Their mail is addressed to the same name as mine. When they married, most of them, dropped their maiden name and took the same one I did. It's just such a strange feeling, but it's also funny how it brings a solidarity to us. I've never met one of them in person, but we all respond when called by the same name. These are my instant friends.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
The Ultimate Clique
Posted by Hesses Madhouse at 12:18 PM
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3 comments:
Oh.my.heck. That is hilarious and I love it. I can't wait to see how many darilyn's there are.
that is FUUUUNNY!!! i want to be a JULIE HESS, too!! :)
there are not many MERRIANNE's out there....especially the way my name is spelled. :( I'm not cool like YOU!!
I've thought about doing something with Facebook before. I probably ought to at some point, but my Internet-security-nerd paranoia's been making me hesitate, not knowing what nefarious uses all that personal data could be put to (identity theft, for example, is soooo not pretty).
Although the one I really want to keep my kids far away from still sounds like MySpace, I haven't really heard anything negative about Facebook, so maybe I'll go give it a whirl.
I recently took the plunge and signed up at a similar site, LinkedIn.com, which looks something like the professional networking equivalent of Facebook (if we assume the latter has a personal networking emphasis). I have been surprised how many people I'm personally connected to via one or two levels of mutual friends: 88 direct acquaintences so far, 9600+ friends of friends, 1231600 friends of friends of friends, which only count those people we know who are on that site. Kinda makes the whole Kevin Bacon thing less unlikely, huh?
I think the idea of your personal little army of Julie Hesses is pretty cool, though. I've run into a few more famous people on the internet with my name over the years. Other than occasionally getting their email, it's kinda amusing.
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