On Facebook and reconnecting...

I had signed up to Facebook a while back, and lost some time enjoying playing around with some of the features. It was however, pretty much very rare to find people I knew there, but that is changing.



In the past few weeks, I've found people I hadn't heard of in ages. I found Verónica F., my best friend from 1st grade and all the way to junior high. I did get to hear from her through others occassionally, but not in a while. I learned that now she is married and has a baby girl. I even got to see pictures. Pretty cool! It was also funny because just a few days earlier I had been thinking about her and our complex world of LOGS. Our elementary school had painted logs that were used as benches. We named most of them, and our very favorite was a big green one, El Tronco de la Risa (The Laughing Log), which made us laugh every time we sat on it. There was also an orange one "el tronco de la mala suerte" (Bad Luck Log); and whenever we sat down on it, bad things happened to us. We did theorize that we probably were "programming" ourselves, but once Lizette R. sat on it. We tried to convince her to get off, but she wouldn't listen to reason. We were concerned, so we even tried forcibly removing her, but Lizette was always stronger than us -and mostly she was not afraid of use her full force. After we all lined up to go back to the classrooms, Lizette got distracted and bonked her head against a wall. She got a huge goose bump. That was the proof we needed that the logs were indeed magical, and they did not only affect us. This must have been around 3rd or 4th grade. We stayed with the logs through elementary, mainly because it was fun. At some point later on, we even wrote a comic strips with the logs and ourselves as characters. Verónica we drew with pigtails, and our version of me had 2 braids, my favorite hairstyle.



I also reconnected with Leslie R, who was my friend in preschool in that same school, and for a while in early elementary. I have a few fond memories of her, but also one of the weirdest days of my live as a young kid. I was invited to lunch and then we probably begged for a sleepover because it was a school night, so it was probably unplanned. We had fun, but early next morning, she was not feeling well. Now, in my house, when you were not feeling well, you still were sent to school, with an aspirin to make you feel better. And yes, the children's aspirin boxes already had that warning: do not give to kids as it might be related to Reye's Syndrome; but nobody cared. Back to the story, Leslie (this is all from my memory of course), decided she was not going to school, so it was arranged that her aunt would pick me up. I knew her aunt, Miss Blanquita, who among other things substituted for the English teachers, and I also knew she had 3 kids in the school, Denisse in our grade but in a different classroom. I simply remember that it was a very long ride to school that day.



A few years later I was "promoted" to the classroom where Denisse was. I always liked Denisse, she got along with everybody, including us the outcasts. She was one of the few in the "A" classroom who did not care that much about grades: a nice refreshing change in that über-competitive room, where an 85% in a test was received with great shame and grief. Miss Blanquita was my English teacher in 6th grade. She was an awesome teacher, and it made me feel very special that she asked me for a word in English if she did not know it; or maybe she was just asking to be nice.



I am naturally, speaking of Miss Blanquita and Denisse since they are now also my friends in Facebook.



Ivan M, who I met in our senior year in high school also randomly found me there. He said he had looked for me in other directories, but had had no luck. He was thrown off by my location, but says that the adventurer spirit of my profile picture gave me away. Ivan was already living a very interesting life when we were friends. He had come from Nicaragua to Mexico to stay at family friends' house and study there for a year or two. Things in Nicaragua got really bad, so he was unable to return for several years. Naturally, he was more mature than most of us. He now is back in his homeland, married and with a daughter.



I also reconnected with another high school friend (sophomore year/4to prepa), José Carlos. I had heard nothing from him in many years. He had a band with a friend, and we collected autographs from him; claiming one day they'd be worth a lot of money. Imagine my surprise to find out that he is still playing in a band, with the same guy from junior high. I got to listen to some of their music, and I have to go back to hear more.

There are more people, a cousin of my cousins, distant cousins and uncles/aunts; a bunch of my former students from Mexico's Tec. Since those guys are younger, there are a lot more of them in Facebook. The ones I have added as friends were from the bicultural program which was a bilingual and competitive program. It has been no surprise to see than scattered all over th world, many of them Ivy League alumni or curent students. It has been great to see how smart kids like those, can really do so well when they have peers of a similar level, and a good educational ambience.

Sorry this was only in English. I want to get going with this blog. I am really tired of the MSN spaces failing; I can't stand that many times people have been unable to read my blogs see my pictures.