It fascinates me that you live on, even after you've been dead to me for, like, ever

I've always had a hard time imagining people, once they've made their grand exit from my immediate sphere, actually going on about their own lives without me in them.

This makes me sound like the horrible megalomaniac villain in a kid's cartoon, doesn't it? What an egotistical wretch, you're all thinking. Assuming the world revolves around her. Ugh.

Hey, maybe I am. No, I probably, most definitely am. As my age creeps closer and closer to the 'middle of the road' mark, I am beginning to accept that the world is a vast and wonderful place that will continue to spin on its axis with little more than a wince or a resigned sigh when I make my final departure – hopefully not for a while. My role, in the big picture, is probably fairly small. Significant, I'd like to think, but small nonetheless.

Yet, it's disgusting how I imagine myself playing such a huge role in peoples' lives, I actually have allowed myself to assume that once they've moved on and are no longer players in what I imagine as The Kristin Show, they remain forever suspended as they were the last time I saw them: wearing a flannel smelling of woodsmoke, drinking a Coors Light, and never again beyond, oh, say, 22 years old.

Oh, and never being quite the same after losing me as a friend/lover/student/coworker.

Technology is fucking all that up for me though.

I don't remember what the world was like without the internet; I can't remember having pen pals or having to go to the library to research something. And now that we have the Facebook, this crazy train on which every single person I've ever known at every stage of my life is a card-carrying regular commuter, I can find out just how wrong I was in my self-centered theory whenever the heck I want.

I think I blogged about this some time ago on FERTILE. About old boyfriends who'd gotten married and gained weight but lost hair, who'd produced little humans who carry their characteristics in the most devastatingly obvious ways – my GOD, she has his EYES, just look at how he SMIRKS! – and how strange it all is, and sorta, well, unnatural.

Part of me has always believed that on this journey we encounter all kinds of people. Some stay with us a long time, some only briefly, but we are to learn important life lessons from each of them.

That's why I'm having a hard time understanding how it can be that I'm Facebook friends with the boy who put a booger in my sandwich in a junior high school cafeteria, thereby humiliating me and devouring my self esteem for my entire pubescent tenure. I log on each evening and see pictures of his little girl trick or treating or playing Wii and 'like' them. Is that masochistic? Or is it evolution? Or is it, like cloning the family dog, simply against nature's plan?

I struggle with it. I really do. And yet I will hop on the old iPhone, while stuck in traffic, and hastily type in some simply HILARIOUS thing Lily's quipped in the backseat of the car so that the kid who grew up in the house next door to me can read it while HE is stuck in traffic or on the subway or laying in bed or on the toilet or something.

WHY this need to be so tightly connected? Curious what y'all think.