My Pen Pal

I joined Facebook yesterday. This is an experiment. I'm too old for such things, but many of my equally old friends belong, and so I thought I'd give it a try. So far it's a little bit intimidating, because I don't really know what I'm supposed to do there. Anyway, I was examining pictures of my new Facebook-friends (who are all old friends of mine in real life) at the computer in my parents' kitchen, and my mom, who is about as tech savvy as one of our presidential candidates (and not the one she voted for), saw a picture of Barack Obama on my page standing next to one of my actual friends, and she was finally impressed with my social networking prowess, "Oh! Are you Facebook-friends with Barack Obama?!" I said no, but I pointed out that it probably wasn't all that hard to befriend our president-elect on Facebook. However, since he already drove me away from my old yahoo email address by emailing me every day, and since he already turned me, a die-hard phone answerer, into a dedicated call-screener for a full week before the election, I wasn't about to allow him to become my Facebook buddy.

Still, Sarah pointed me to his new transition website and I read through it, and there was a link to make a comment, and suddenly I found myself writing him a letter.

"Dear Mr. President," I wrote, thrilling at the sound of it, "I am writing to thank you for the press conference you participated in this week. I would like to urge you to continue to be open and available to the press. As an American, I have longed for the old days when the president held regular press conferences, and faced the tough questions from the media as a regular course of events. You will make mistakes," (because I'm experienced in making mistakes and I want Obama to benefit from my wisdom), "but don't hide from them. Stand in front of the press and face their questions, because you owe it to the people who voted for you and worked for you and campaigned for you, to meet honestly and often with the media whose job it is to monitor your work."

Or something like that. Anyway, I await his response. This could be the beginning of a beautiful non-Facebook friendship.