What Valentine's Day signifies to me…

Looking through my blog’s archive for the past four or five years or so, I am surprised as I haven’t tackled this particular topic head-on during one of those years.  Certainly those days have echoed the same feelings and sentiments that today holds for me, perhaps not quite as strongly, but definitely they were difficult days.  Today I want to lay out what I think about this special day and how it is one of those benchmark days I look at to assess my life.

Every year there are days in which you stop and take stock of what your life has become, where you are going, what you have achieved, what you seek in the future. For me these days have always been: my birthday (August 21), New Years Day, and Valentines Day.  The first two are somewhat obvious days to reassess as they both represent something of new beginnings and a chance to reflect on your previous year of life or of the calendar. The last is a day I typically use to reflect upon my personal relationships and if I am any closer to filling that hole in my life.

As much as I might prefer to just push this to the back of my mind, it becomes nearly impossible as February 14 approaches. This year it seems more so than in the past that EVERYONE is in a relationship (heck even my brother is!).  To say I am not happy for everyone would be untrue. I am, but I truly feel jealous and somewhat hurt by it all.  I think I have many wonderful qualities that someone is missing out on, so it just makes me sad that either I can’t showcase them properly or I am not worth taking a chance on in everyone’s eyes. As the years have passed, I have begun slowly preparing for (but hoping strongly against) a lifetime alone. In years past I have been much more hopeful about my relationship front, but the year ahead seems particularly grim at the moment.  But that could always change I guess…it only takes a moment.

Until that moment I am filling my broken heart with all the warmth that movies and television can provide. I am a romantic at heart (which no one probably knows), so I gravitate to shows and movies that tell stories of love unrequited.  They seem to resonate with me, as someone who is waiting for his opportunity to seize the day and go for love.

So for this year my date for Valentine’s Day is once again chemistry.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all the lovebirds in the world.  Cherish that feeling.

Finding something synergistic out of Facebook, Twitter, and now Google Buzz…

With the growing prevalence of social networking (at least ones that have some main stream popularity…sorry FriendFeed), I am (and have been) striving to find an efficient way to use them to share content.  Each of them covers a slightly different niche and potentially reaches a different audience (if it reaches one at all :-(…)

Facebook has always been ground zero for me, since some point in 2005 when it first hit the scene. Slowly it has pushed things like IM more to the backburner leaving that mainly for communication with family or close friends. As Facebook has branched out into a large platform adding the ability to share things such as photos and videos and more significantly post status updates, it has become an increasingly convenient  way to share my life with my extended network of friends and see what is up in their lives. In many ways the inherent visibility sometimes limits what I want to throw up there. I don’t necessarily want to constantly flood my feed with every thought feeling or detail of my life, so it doesn’t necessarily fulfill all that I want to offer to the world.

At some point in 2007, I began to use Twitter as a means to supplement this blog, giving me a way to provide more consistent updates on even more inane topics. I am much more willing to throw up darker feeling from my life there and more random thoughts (Rangers!) than I would on Facebook.  Much of this is because I have a much smaller (near zero) group of followers there, so it feels like I am talking into a vacuum, providing a nice sounding board. (mixed metaphor…yikes!)  Twitter provides an interesting way to peer into the lives of people whom I otherwise wouldn’t be able to…athletes, celebrities, journalists, tech-heads, etc. This is endlessly entertaining and it is fun to be a part of their daily lives. It is a bit disappointing that I haven’t been able to cultivate a group of friends to share in the experiences in a more social manner…this shows my lack of skills in the social world.

So defining the niches I have already established for Facebook and Twitter, where does that leave Google Buzz? Well that is the very question I am asking myself…I mean I certainly don’t have to use every social network that comes around, but I like to feel a part of a community…even if it highlights my inadequacies.  After playing around with Google Buzz for a couple days it strikes me as the most significant feature it offers is the ability to look at what people are saying “nearby.” Twitter and Facebook really don’t provide a good location based service and I think this may compete well against services like FourSquare and Gowalla.  I also like the feed integration and the way it connects to my other Google services.  Unfortunately, again it highlights my lack of social standing.  My list of Google contacts/friends is remarkably small, so it suffers a bit in the same way as Twitter in that the real social interaction aspects are currently missing for me.  I can see that changing as adoption increases in the near future, but until then it may become another “sounding-board” for my thoughts…or perhaps a content aggregator of my other sources (i.e. shared items on Google Reader and photos on Flickr).  Finally, it does as quite a bit of beef to my Google profile which is quickly looking like a place I may want to direct the loads and loads of interested parties (ha!) to my information.

I guess as everything is…this will just have to be a work-in-progress and worth another thought