February 17th, 2010 03:14pm
Facebook Friendships
Everyone has a Facebook. And you? You have, like, 3,000 friends! It’s easy to feel popular every time you log on. And you are getting to know all these people as they update their statuses. At any given hour, you can find out what your friends ate for breakfast, that they are bored, that they have a lot of homework to do, that their parents are dweebs, that they went to the bathroom 5 times in an hour…..
But is it real?
I heard this term – cotton candy friendships – the other day, and it stuck with me. It was regarding the social life of teens online, especially when it comes to Facebook. Think about it. Cotton candy is the kind of treat that we all crave. It is super sweet, has a great texture, and dissolves in your mouth. Who really wants to share their cotton candy? Not me! When you buy cotton candy, you want it all to yourself. You can eat a whole bunch of that yummy cotton goodness! But what happens 30 minutes later? You’re hungry. You want something real. You need to be fed. (more…)
You had to have been living in a cave to have missed the local hot topic of the week. A Santa Rosa Mom went before the Santa Rosa City school board to plead her case as to why the book, The Tortilla Curtain, by TC Boyle, needed to be removed from the required reading list. …. In the end, the school board voted unanimously to keep the book on the required reading list, and left the option that students may read a different book if they choose not to read this one. But this event brings two very clear points to light… 
Matthew Gollub of Tortuga Press wrote me this morning in response to “Teenagers and Technology”, the article that ran in the newspaper today. Here’s what he had to say:
“We had to take away the Xbox again last night,” a friend lamented to me. She had caught her son in the wee hours of the morning, plugged in with his headset on, chatting with friends across the country as he maimed opponents in his latest game. It wasn’t the first time, and she was aware that it wouldn’t be the last. And short of taking the game system and throwing it in the Russian River, she wasn’t sure what to do. 
Life seemed to start when my daughter was born in February of 1998. I was 20 years old and I knew nothing about motherhood. 3 years later and I also became the mom of a son. But when I look back at all that now, I can see that this was only the prologue. Life changes, and mine certainly did when I became a divorced mom with two kids to raise.