What have I done?????

I'm fairly technologically savvy. I build my own computers from the ground up. I add components to a laptop without thinking twice about it. I know my cameras and my software. I have broadband at the house, and a cell phone (dammit!) and a wireless network. I mean, really, I have even setup a VPN for the house and the church. I'm not technologically inept. I converted to digital photography before it became too onerous to shoot film, adapting early and quickly and enjoying it along the way.

I understand how addictive it can be - this technology upon which we've come to rely. I'm not addicted to it, just usually very obsessed and some obsessions last much longer than others. Diesels are one of them. Photography is another. I enjoy my truck, probably far too much - but hey, it gets 22mpg and can haul my house if I want it to. I love photography - enough that I could take a camera and disappear for weeks on end and never sell a single photo - and be fine with that! I know my way around Photoshop and now Lightroom just so I can keep my stuff organized and looking the way I want them to look.

I'm fairly well connected with people with whom I'm close. I mean really close - my immediate family, my church, my close friends (people that I see and have dinner with more than once every 5 years), and my co-workers. These are the people that surround me in daily life. The ones with whom I commune.

I e-mail; I use the cell phone; I leave voice messages and occasionally text (GAH!); and I try to have lunch at least once a week with someone I consider a close friend or family member. I even tried to connect with my uncle and my brother today, on a whim that didn't pan out, but ended up hangin' with a buddy from the office on an errand to just connect about our lives.

I'm not a social butterfly. I'm not the life of the party. I'm very introverted and cautious. I just received a report back from an assessment I took for the office that pegged me as a flat 0% for "gregariousness". Out of the 2+ MILLION people who've taken this, 100% scored higher than me on their inclination to be social. Yep, that's me. Everything else is learned behavior. REALLY!!! It is. I promise!

I read blogs every weekday and most weekends. I love Google Reader since it sticks them all in one place and constantly refreshes. No slogging through 100+ pages of medical interest, photographic, friends, complete strangers and even just plain fun stuff.

But this weekend came the fateful, dreaded, curs-ed invite.

We all know the one. It's the one that absolutely sucks time completely out of our lives. We awake semi-comatose from too little sleep and too much caffeine (or wine) and we attempt to function productively at our J-O-Bs in a vain effort to pretend we can be everything to everyone.

I should've known if for no other reason than the person who sent me that curs-ed e-mail. He's one of the highest energy people I've ever met and I had the pleasure of becoming great friends with him in the early 90's. He moved out West.

I stayed close to home, even moved away from the city into a fairly rural lifestyle where I have to cut, haul, and split my own firewood without too much benefit of "modern technology". Mauls, wedges, and now fiberglass handles. Dirt floors in the workshop and the stable (no there are no aminals, nor will there be anytime soon!); surrounded by woods with creeks running through them where the kids play and grow; little pond where I can cast my fly-line when I have the urge; and peace and quiet.

He and I have lost contact, as much from the distance as from all the above-mentioned clutter in my life - I can't speak for his.

I read real books. Augustine, Calvin, Barth, Dagg, Cussler, Shaw, - biographies, theology, fiction, absolute crap (Shaw), and glorious tomes that I want to memorize but never find the time or the discipline to accomplish. I despise TV - OK, maybe not completely, but enough to avoid it during American football season and most evenings when CSI or The Unit are on. I try to spend time with the kids, or workin with the lathe or the camera, or remodeling a bathroom or a kitchen, or adding a filtration system to the well (but not messing with the well pump - that's bad news). I wake early and go to bed late, filling my day with all sorts of things that keep me busier than I should be already.

Now, I've gone and done the un-thinkable. And I have to tell my wife, because she's going to start noticing all the things that no longer get accomplished around the house.

I've gone and answered the invite.

It's a very good thing the filters at the office don't let the site through, because I would never get anything accomplished.

I joined Facebook.

dammit!