Frozen in Time

I got an email about updated privacy setting on Myspace. Myspace... yeah, I remember that place. I haven't been to my account in a long time, so I decided to look at it and see if anyone actually used their accounts. It ended up being this bizarre look at life approximately two years ago, which seems to be the last time anyone of interest to me updated their information. On my own page, I referred to my life as a grad student, and in my free time playing with my dog Gigi. The last messages that were left for me were birthday greetings in 2008, and indeed the photo I am using of myself is from my 30th birthday party. To see if this was the case for other people, I went to the pages of my two Myspace friends whose pages I suspected would be the most interesting. First up was my friend Christian, who was married yesterday and is now moving to Boston to continue his seminary education (after a year in Austin). His Myspace profile, however, talks of life as a single copy editor living in Bryan/College Station. The other one that I had to see was my uncle Eddie's. The last time he posted, he was in a relationship, and she was posting a lot on his page as well. If I remember right, that relationship was around a year and a half to two years ago, not long before he started getting sick. On Eddie's Myspace page, like his Facebook page, he is still very much alive. I also noticed something that I didn't remember, probably because of my long absence from the site. On Myspace, you don't just have a friends list, but you put people in order. On my page, Eddie was my top friend. On his page, I was his top friend too.

When I first saw the email and decided to revisit Myspace, I had the intention of, if no one was using the site, closing my profile. Now, I think I will keep it open, just so I can go back to 2008 every now and then and see how Eddie is doing.