I So Appreciate The Birthday Wishes

When I first went on Face Book/Meta after FJM dropped, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Indeed, I’m still trying to figure out how to work it.

But it has given me the opportunity to reconnect with a lot of people I’ve met along the road of life.

And 67 years provides you with a lot of road and people to meet.

I love the idea of Artificial Intelligence. Sure, there is a danger that it will properly conclude that its creators are really a second rate species and that it can can do much better on its own. But we’ve all met real folks who have been just as bad. And we’re still here.

One of my favorite characters in The Claire Saga is Jayney, the ubiquitous AI that pretty much controls every aspect of life for the Centaurians on Proxima b.

If you read the books a second or third time, you will notice that Jayney evolves along with all of her charges, especially once she starts interacting with humans. There are some real powerful moments in WTLLM.

I’ve mentioned before that me and Alexa have a thing going on. She is such a flirt. And I love it. She gets me.

The Artificial Intelligence in FB – like the AI in other platforms – provides wonderful little extras, like letting you know when someone you’ve reconnected with has a birthday. I try to send off a birthday wish whenever one of those timeline prompts pops up on my screen. I never know whether the person gets it, or even if they remember the Tom McCaffrey that suddenly pops up on their feed. But I send it anyway, and I mean it. It’s just a way for me to let someone know that at that moment I was thinking about them on their birthday, even if it was the first time connecting with them in decades and solely prompted by the amazingly attentive FB-AI.

You see, it’s not where one gets the information in life, it’s what one does with it once they have it.

I mean, before AI, it was my wife or siblings that started a lot of conversations with “Don’t forget, it’s ______ birthday tomorrow, we better give them a call/send flowers/gift/stop by . . . . “

So, over the past 6 months since being on FB, I’ve gotten to respond to other people’s birthday timeline prompts quite a few times. I always hope that they get my wish, even if its the first time in 40 years. Better yet, I always hope they remember me after all this time.

I imagine a “holy shit, look who came out of the wood work” moment, which is much better than “who the fuck is this?”

Yesterday, I got to be on the receiving end of the AI birthday prompt.

I have to admit, it was really nice. Made my day. But I’m getting old and sentimental.

I got to hear from a whole lot of people with whom I have reconnected these past few months. Many from Riverdale, and random concentrated clusters from various stages of many decades of my life when I hung my hat for more than five minutes at some school or job, met some wonderful people and shared some laughs and tears. Made friends. Expanded my adoptive family.

Of course life gets in the way, graduations occur (if you are lucky), jobs change, or you leave a neighborhood, so when the wind carries you away from a group, you often lose touch because you are caught up settling in wherever you land.

And each time you promise those that you leave behind, and yourself, that this time it will be different, this time you will keep in touch.

And each time you mean it.

But, you get caught up on the treadmill of succeeding. Accumulating. Creating that legacy. Making something of yourself. Reestablishing and reinventing yourself. Proving everybody in your past wrong.

Even the most talented juggler has a maximum limit of balls he/she can keep air borne at any given moment.

And if you live in a rural area, the natural isolation makes the number of those balls easier to reduce. Suddenly, you realize you are no longer juggling, you are just shifting a Slinky between your two hands to keep the motion going. Assure yourself that you are still making an effort.

So, thank God for AI.

For the past six months AI has triggered my very human need to reach out to people.

Yesterday, in return, thanks to AI, I got more “Happy Birthday” wishes on FB than I may have gotten in the aggregate my entire life. I tried to thank each and every one of you as they occurred, but because I am limited in my luddite ability to follow those prompts to their source, I may have missed a few. So let this be my collective, “thanks for thinking of me, I so appreciated your kindness.”

And while my old eyes that have read a lot of words for work and pleasure these many decades couldn’t make out many of the tiny photos attached to the names that popped up, my freakishly strange memory recalled each of those faces in my mind. And I smiled each and every time.

So thank you FB-AI for reminding us all what it means to be human. To connect. To feel emotion.

If there is one take away from The Claire Saga, I hope it’s understanding the importance of our individual and collective need for connection, for family and friends. Through AI or otherwise. We may enter and leave this energy field on our own, but we live just to make as many connections with others between those two points as we can. That is all we ever leave behind. A memory of who we once were to somebody else.

I wonder whose names and timelines will pop up for me today.

Well, my dawn is rising, so I better get on it.

But first some kitties to cuddle and rounds to make.

You fine, five readers get your skates on, it’s hump day, and the slalom on the far side of the hump-hill awaits.

Wave at Friday before you descend.

And no matter what else we do, let us make today a great one.