Category: En route

I’m taking my second swimming lesson today at the Brooklyn YMCA. As I succeeded in 1. actually getting into the pool, 2. not actually drowning, and 3. fatefully achieving self-propelled forward motion albeit with the assistance of a boogie board and two of those noodle flotation devices wrapped around my gut, I’m going to call my two year old New Year’s resolution achieved. That does not mean I’m going to be Michael Phelps anytime soon, but I do have confidence that I will be successful, and it only took a few moments to get beyond those personal barriers that reinforced my 24 months of procrastination. Sometimes you just have to do it.

Welcome to my annual New Year’s message/note/blog posting. You’re getting this because you somehow participated in my life this year, or – for this year most significantly – are one of the many people I’ve connected or reconnected with through Facebook.

The procedure is as follows: I  review statistics of the past year, followed by a hopefully amusing anecdote, and then conclude with resolutions for the next year.

Statistics

Megabytes of Email this year: 3895 (up almost 300%, also mostly spam, and I’m only counting Gmail, since it is an incredible pain in the neck to figure out with certainly how much space you are using in an Microsoft Exchange account.)

Miles in a rental car: 0 (I didn’t have occasion to rent a car this year – good thing too considerig the cost of gas/petrol.)

Miles in a Zipcar car share: 1564 (up 50% from 2007, but now kind of torn between them saving me a bundle not having to own a car or pay crazy amounts for gas, and them screwing up my reservation for the one day I really needed it in October, and then afterwards getting socked for a bogus repair bill ).

Miles in a plane: 8270 (down 35% from 2007). Will have to do something about this.

Places visited this year: Washington, D.C.; Red Bank, NJ; Lakewood, NJ; Seattle, WA; Mohegan Sun, CT; London, England

What We Can Believe In

In case you haven’t been keeping track, I got married in October to my longtime sweetheart, Pei.  We invite you to check out our recently and extensively updated wedding website at

http://www.peiback.com/wedding

Among the features include professional photos, accounts of how we got together, were engaged, and survived our wedding day, a complete musical playlist, and online videos of the ceremony and the banquet. If you were there, several mysteries can now be revealed; if you couldn’t be there, we hope that you will be able to enjoy some of the happiness of our day. We are thinking about a 2009 Asia World Tour, maybe in the latter half of the year, so if you’re in Asia, let’s talk.

So once you’re done with all that, here is another little story:

I’ve been a Facebook member for about a year. My wife refuses to join Facebook – she thinks it is just another one of those sites like Friendster and MySpace, and that she would rather network in “real life” (she isn’t a Luddite – you can find her during most any hour engrosssed in instant messaging).

The thing is that Facebook actually works. Chances are the people that you want to know about are on Facebook;  if they want you to know what is up with them, they can have that info pushed to you in a manageable way. This framework separates the who you are targeting part of message writing (you choose your friends and groups and their privacy settings)  from the actual  drafting of the message, which makes it possible for hundreds or thousands of people to be kept up-to-date.

We know for a fact that this form of networking was a pivotal factor in the recent U.S. elections, but what did this do for my life? In brief:

• I went to two Facebook Friends’ (FBF’s for short) independent films, one of which I drove two hours to central New Jersey to see, and the other I was able to arrange sponsorship of a reception.
• I worked with another filmmaker FBF living in Hong Kong to submit a short film in a contest in New York.
• I reconnected with a dozen people from my twentieth high school reunion, a number of which I met again at another high school alumni event.
• I was invited through Facebook back to the anniversary of a college charity fashion show I used to work for 15 years ago, and encountered someone I knew from the Asian lawyer’s association that had worked on the same event a few years before me.
• Facebook was the “neutral” communication channel between the groom’s party and Pei’s bridesmaids. I kept in touch with one of my groomsmen living in Asia, and planned his tux accessories.My cousins in Canada fed me addresses and spreadsheets from their wedding.
• One FBF friend whom I recently had traveled with to Seattle was en route to India and narrowly avoided staying in one of the bombed Mumbai hotels. We were able to see that he was OK in real time.
• One FBF friend asked for tips for a trip to Japan. He used one of my tips to enjoy a fine and inexpensive sushi breakfast in Tokyo.
• One FBF told me about a Taiwanese singer that was going to perform on the East Coast that I had previously seen in Las Vegas with another FBF, and connected with a third FBF that was attending.
• One FBF is starting a consulting business where I was able to immediately refer one friend for an interview, and another for use of her services.
• The farthest FBF reconnects were a neighborhood friend of the family who is now in the toy business in Malaysia, half a dozen people from elementary school, and a member of a religious order who was one of my teachers in high school.
• We celebrated major life events. Congrats to the 3 other FBFs that wedded, the 6 FBFs that had new babies, one FBF that is still expecting, and the FBFs that are moving from and to New York. In addition to our wedding, I also received lots of messages when I became the godfather of my best man’s daughter.
• Just this past week, while my wife was caring for me when I was deathly sick with laryngitis and bronchitis, I also received tips, commiseration, and advice from people that noticed my status.

Now the point here is not necessarily that Facebook is the be all and end all — at some point there will be another next great thing, that’s for sure. And sure, you can probably use the phone, instant messaging, or email to accomplish this the same thing, if you have plenty of time and a social secretary. However, it is astounding that Facebook makes a list like the one above possible today.

You know, the one thing I learned about this marriage thing is we are not alone, and we don’t have to go it alone. This is what we need more of: the hopes, prayers and best wishes of our friends and family. This is what we can believe in.

Resolutions

For two years running, I’ve been putting out two resolutions: the one I’m really going to do (which have included proposing and then getting married successfully to Pei), and the other one that I have spectacularly failed to complete over this time, which is to really learn how to swim. I’ve joined the YMCA, perused the class schedules, looked at the facilities, and even hit the showers, but I have not made it into the pool. I’m going to put this single resolution on again for this third year — let’s see if I can do it.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end.  Pei and I hope that you will have a wonderful 2009. Oh, it’s your turn on Wordscraper!