How Myspace changed my life

At some point a few years ago, I got a MySpace profile. I think I was bored. I probably wanted to see if I could stalk some kids that I went to high school with. Seriously, that's about all the thought I put into it. I found a few people that I knew, and found plenty of others to mock. I never though that getting a MySpace profile would change my life in any appreciable way.

And then it did.

I'm adopted. I've got a biological family floating around out there. They are presumably doing the things that come along with living: eating dinner, making car payments, fighting with one another, and having good times together. Although I probably wasn't supposed to know anything about them, my foster mother slipped up and told my mother a bunch of identifying things about them. Y'know, things like names, occupation, home town. Things that i certainly wasn't supposed to know, given that my adoption was among the last closed adoptions to take place in Oregon. I've even got the amended birth certificate that lists my mom and dad as my birth parents, although they certainly had nothing to do with my actual genesis as a human being. My mom also told me that I could seek out my birth family when I turned 21. Maybe they'd want to see me, maybe they wouldn't. There was no harm in trying; the worst thing they could do was say "no." The age of 21 came and went without me doing anything of the kind. I changed my mind about what I wanted to be when I grew up, and eerily enough, I chose an occupation that many people in my birth family favored. Creepy.

Fast forward to this October. I was bored and poking around on MySpace. There wasn't much interesting to see. Most of the people I know from Ferndale are pretty boring (with the exception of you, Stef). I was so achingly bored that my mind was running around in circles, thinking of things to search for. I looked up one of Chris' ex-girlfriends. She had her profile set to "private." What fun is that? I searched for the girls that I had really hated in high school, only to discover that i still didn't like them. Finally, it dawned on me. I knew that I had a brother out there. I knew his name. Maybe he had a MySpace profile. I typed in his name, pressed "search" and was confronted with a male who could only be one person. Yes, he was my brother. I stared at his profile picture for hours. It was like I had seen him before. After a few days of obsessively looking at his profile picture, I took the plunge. I contacted him. Through MySpace. In the lamest way possible. I told him, via a comment on his comment page, that I liked his hat. Thus, an awkward relationship was born. We exchanged emails and instant messages for two months, getting to know each other better. Apparently, both he and his sister are in medical school. They both went to Ivy League schools. They both claimed to remember me. Creepy.

Finally, it happened. Last night, Chris and I drove down to Portland to have dinner with this guy. There are no words that can fully describe this experience, but it was sort of like a blind date with more baggage. We effectively didn't know each other, and yet we had quite a history. I disappeared from his life when he was seven years old. He remembers me coming home from the hospital as a new born. I have some really vague memories of him as a little boy. It was surreal.

And that is how MySpace changed my life.