I've been calling my mother every Sunday night at 9pm for probably the past ten years. A couple weekends back when I was Normandy, I lost track of the day, as you often do when you're on vacation, and forgot to call. What followed was a series of increasingly frantic emails on her part, wondering where on Earth I was. It started off with "Samantha, it's after 9, are you going to call?" to "It's getting late now...just wondering where you are..." to "What's going on? Has something happened??" etc etc. My poor mother, being the uber-worrier that she is, didn't sleep a wink that night.

When I finally talked to her the next day, I got a five-minute long lecture about how important it is for me to keep in touch with her, and how I need to give her the email address & phone number of one of my friends here. But she makes a good point - before, if anything happened, Fabrice would've told her immediately. But now that I'm single - who would inform her in case of an accident (or worse)? With the way my job is and how much I travel, I could easily be gone a week or even two before anyone would even know something was wrong. Though thanks to social media, I would hope some of you would notice the lack of posting on here, FB, etc. But even then - how would anyone be able to contact my family since none of my family & friends from back home even know about the existence of this blog?

Which reminds me of another interesting topic that came up in conversation lately - what happens to all of these various accounts we have when we die? Your Facebook/myspace page, Twitter, email accounts, etc. It's kind of eery to think about continuing on virtually even after you're no longer here. People could keep emailing you or posting on your wall and have no clue - they'd just think you were a jerk for not ever writing back.

I did some searching around online and found out that Facebook recently came up with a "deceased" notification form, which allows you to contact them in the case of a death of someone on your list. Their page will stay active, but will be visible only to friends and will no longer show up in searches, making it essentially a virtual memorial. Kinda cool, huh? Imagine if back in 2003, someone had told the inventors of Facebook that they would one day need a page for deceased people - I imagine it's a similar reaction to what I would've had if someone would've told me I'd still be living in France in 2009. Still, it's interesting to think about how all of these new social media and social networking sites are changing the way we keep track of people from the cradle to the grave.