(I didn’t care for that movie, BTW.)

My mom asked me a couple of days ago about how certain privacy settings on a particular social networking site works. We discussed who can see what information, and she said she’d assumed everything I posted on that networking site is open to anyone who wants to see it. I told her no way; there are some limited items (certain photos, for example) I allow people within one degree of separation to see, but just about everything else is restricted to just people within my circle. Turned out she was asking because a relative of ours in Taiwan, roughly my age, had seen something about me through my mom’s social networking page. The relative had told my mom that she’d looked on Google Maps where I live and made the comment to my mom that “Wow, Cindy lives so far from you.” My mom had of course agreed, since she’d always lamented about the 40-mile distance between our homes which, to my mom, essentially makes me equivalent to having moved to Egypt.
“So you must have your address public,” my mom concluded.
“No I don’t; in fact, I was pretty careful to not put my location on that site AT ALL,” I said.
And then moments later it came to me. On that profile, I’d put my location as Nadi, Fiji. You know, the island near Tahiti? I figured ANYONE would know I don’t actually live in that exotic locale, and that I had used it as a place-filler cuz I don’t want to reveal my actual city of residence. I’ve never even been to Fiji, altho there are photos of me and Mr. W from the Paul Gauguin cruise that took us to the Society Islands (Tahiti, Taha’a, Bora Bora, Moorea, etc) near Fiji. But she can’t see those photos anyway.

It somehow amuses me to picture this relative looking at the limited information about me, seeing “Nadi, Fiji,” googling it to see that it’s an island in the South Pacific practically next to Australia, and then thinking, “Wow, that’s quite a commute to Diamond Bar.”