on facebook and neighbors

True story.

We have these across the street neighbors, right? They're a little younger than us, keep to themselves. He's a musician, I don't know what she does. They have a little dog that they walk, together, at the same time every day. My dog barks at the piano students as they are dropped off in the afternoons, and he barks again, half an hour later, when their parents pick them up. They have a very sensitive alarm system that once summoned the fire department over burnt toast (My kids didn't complain, of course). That's it, that's all I've got. We wave to one another and live as most neighbors do, by keeping to ourselves.

Last week our across the street neighbor sent Brian a Facebook friend request. It took him a minute for the name to register, but once it did, he accepted, of course.

And learned that our across the street neighbor is a member of Street Corner Symphony, who was the runner-up in the Sing Off a couple of weeks ago.

I'm not wowed by the fact that there's a celebrity (of sorts) among us. I"m really excited for him, because as the wife of a musician I know what it means for musicians to get to do what they love. Apparently he's going on tour with Ben Folds in a few weeks, and that's just ... cool.

But as Brian and I watched video clips (to see who Street Corner Symphony was, because you know we watch television like we're sixty years old. We just got Netflix last week, and started Season 1 of Lost this weekend), as we watched clips of the guy across the street who, it turns out, is a really talented musician, I kept thinking - we have known these people for years! And we knew nothing about this while it was happening?! We would have never known anything at all, if it wasn't for Facebook. Not face-to-face interaction with our actual real-life neighbors. Facebook.

We live in a weird, weird world.