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Greetings. I was reading the Times online tonight and saw that in the Sunday Styles section there's an essay writing contest. The contest is for the Modern Love column that runs every Sunday. You can click this link and see the specifics, but the contest asks for college students to write about what they think Love is about these days. Maybe I'll enter, maybe I won't. I'm a college student after all, but that's all secondary.

I went onto Facebook tonight and saw that the girl my good friend was seriously dating is "no longer listed 'as in a relationship'". Stupid Internet, mind your own damn business. In college there were times where your buddy would come into your room, sit on the couch, and say, "I broke up with soandso", and it would catch you completely off guard and you'd put whatever it was you were doing to the side, and you'd sit, face to face, like real people, and you'd be there just to listen and be a friend. I also know that these days I'm not living in the frat house with 30 other guys, so things are of course different, but there are still phones and email. I don't know, I just find it fundamentally wrong that I can get intimate details of friends' relationships the same place I can challenge someone to a game of virtual rock-paper-scissors. This is the second time something like this has happened in the past couple months. Unfortunately, the first time this went down I called my friend and said "I saw that you and soandso broke up", to which he said "what? We did? How do you know?", so I had to explain this Facebook relationship nonsense thing to him. You don't boil a two-year relationship to some stupid icon on a social networking site, you just don't do that.

Call me a hypocrite though, because I've been putting my business out on Front Street via this blog since last May, and I know somehow, in some way, FingerTheBlog is going to end up biting me in the tush, hard. You better believe that if I met a girl that could possibly be Mrs. FingertheBlog I sure as hell wouldn't write a single word about her, although I'm sure at times I'd be tempted. The blurred distinction between public and private is really sick and interesting, and I'm willing to bet that a lot of you have stories similar to the ones I've shared above.

I don't know what I'd write for that NYTimes essay contest, but I will say that today Love can start with an intimate date and end with a cracked heart emoticon two years later, or it can start with a jager bomb in a dive bar and lead to the altar. I'm notorious for thinking that every one of my friends' relationships are going to lead to marriage, and I've been wrong close to 100% of the time, so that shows you how much I know.

And by the way...in case you've seen something like this before, you have, here.