I have been facebooking (my mother likes to use it as a verb). It finally clicked with me; it's like an LFCA but for your life. I get these small updates about everyone's life throughout the day without needing to click through two hundred blogs or make two hundred phone calls. My favourite moments are when I see that I have a friend in common with someone and it was totally unexpected. Like the online world and family criss-crossing or a grad school friend and a work friend that know each other.

I got very hung up on the term "friend" when I first joined and sometimes ended up debating for way too long whether I should send a friend request. For instance, someone I thought was swell from college--add or don't add? I mean, we're not friends; I wouldn't ship chicken soup to their San Francisco abode if they were sick. But I'd love to hear what they've been up to. What to do, what to do...perhaps not take the term "friend" quite so seriously.

Then I went in the opposite direction, sending out friend requests to people I had crushes on in nursery school. Luckily, I didn't send the accompanying note: "hey, it's Melissa from nursery school. I sat near you at circle time and I loved that you smelled like baby powder. I'm still remembering you thirty years later and it will shatter me if you write back that you don't remember that cool bouquet of tissue paper flowers I made for classroom Shabbat. Accept my friend request; you won't regret it!"

Er.

So I'm going for the happy medium; sending out requests when I see someone I know and I want to know how they've been. And recklessly not keeping track of the friend requests I send out so that some people are probably receiving eight or nine copies. I also do this when I really really really want to be someone's friend so there's no way to tell if I'm eager or forgetful. Choose whichever one works better for you if you are one of the recipients of eight friend requests from me.

To make this easy, I am welcoming everyone to friend me. I'll just send this out there--if I read your blog, I like you and I want to hear that you had a really good meal of sushi. So feel free to friend me or become a fan of the book on Facebook so you can hear when I'm reading in your city. If we don't usually converse via email and you think I might not know your name, let me know your blog in that "add message" feature once you hit "add as friend." Because I do tend not to add people that I don't know or who don't tell me they're a reader, etc. It's that whole "you could be completely normal or you could be a PR person or you could just be someone who is going to update their status with porn links every day that I will accidentally click on each morning."

So...er...tell me how we know each other if I know you by another name.

Fine, fine, fine, and I'll send you chicken soup.

I want to thank HUGELY the people who have voted for me in the Weblog Awards. I want to thank even more and therefore it deserves a larger font--THANK YOU--to those who vote and emailed out a call to vote to their friends or turned to the person in the cubicle next to them and said, "hey, could you vote for Stirrup Queens? Um, could you also ignore the strange name of her blog and not ask me any further questions?"

I want to say THANK YOU (in large font) to those who have Twittered it, Facebooked it (there's that verb again), or blogged it. This means more to me than I can express. You find out during these things who has your back in the non-emergency situation sense (which, of course, is different from the crisis sense of the word). And frankly, I am sometimes more interested in who is there for me regardless of what is happening vs. those who show up when all is going to hell. I want both, I guess. No, wait, I don't "guess." I want both. I want people there when it's shitty and people there when it's good, but mostly, I want people there in between.

Voting goes through Tuesday which means please don't stop voting over the weekend if you can get to a computer. Please don't stop Twittering it and putting it on Facebook. In fact, if you haven't voted yet today, please click over and vote for Stirrup Queens and then come back and read some of the cool posts I read this week. It's a small thing to ask, right?

The roundup to the Roundup: You know where to find me on Facebook and become a fan of the book's page if you want to know when I read in your city. Please keep voting. And lots of good posts to read. Catch you here for a very dark Show and Tell on Saturday night.