life is short

The neighbors used to have an idea about what was going on with your kids. Maybe a few family members were in the circle of trust.  It's possible that the guys at work knew a little bit about your marital troubles.  Maybe you trusted the clerk at your 7-11 enough to bitch and moan about your boss.   If you were a mature and well adjusted adult....you may have kept the private stuff private from everybody except your shrink.

Parenting was never as civic as it is today.  It takes a village.   And it's probable that the whole freaking village just read your status update that your 5th grader is failing math.  Marriages are falling apart publicly.  Half those marriages originated from an online sponsored rendevous.  Your boss is likely to surf the interwebs to dig up dirt on you....and he may very well discover that tweet where you referred to him as a greasy douchenozzle. 

Everybody has a mobile sharing device in their pocket.  Blackberry got us tapping at handhelds.   We think we look like Dr. McCoy....but really we all seem more like Koko the gorilla.  And then Steve Jobs put Facebook in all of our pockets.   And now the guy who sat behind me in Social Studies is looking at pictures of my son's first day of school in Beaverton, Oregon while eating Nutella on an english muffin, in a cafe that he is the undisputed Foursquare mayor of, in San Juan, Costa Rica.

We now share our family with a pretty large sphere of confluence via social networking and 21st century communication channels.  It’s so much easier to reach out to friends and family near and far. So the stuff that consumes our daily energy is now commonplace fodder for chit-chat.   The gravity of real-life is not just limited to soul searching conversations between me and my shrink.   Actually, I don't have a shrink.   And not because I don't need one.   But, because I can effortlessly ask for advice from an old college buddy via text message.

Me: "dude, my dad got cancer"
Buddy: "sorry to hear that, you ok?"
Me: "yeah"
Buddy: "life is so short"
Me: "true dat"
Buddy: "hang in there"
Me: "k"