Did You Ever.
It's an amazing thing the internet.
Warning this is long, windy, whiny, twisty, dark and a bit emo...but every bit as important.
Today, is the first of a series of very long long days. I am attempting to reconnect with some older friends, people who I am both trying to find out why I stopped talking to people, and what made them my friends in the first place. I know for some specific people that I just always longed to have a deeper relationships than the surface chatter that occurs across the information highway, and never got to that point.
I was reading someone's journal today, which when you type it out kind of makes it sound really really creepy, but that is far from my point. See this person felt that they had dissconnected themself from the world just a bit too much. They felt that they stepped away from the slowly growing relationships of the internet in search of the more tangible local pool of friends/family/coworkers. It kind of made me go and analyze a bit of the internet relationships that I have had. Some of them stemmed off to create real friends in real places with real involvements in my own close family. Other just remained a surface leveled aquaintances, which is all they will ever really be.
There's even this one guy who IMs me every random time out of the blue. It's an odd kind of friendship. We exchange the trite and typical banter of 'how do you dos' and whats it. While at the same time we just kind of talk, a little bit at a time about abosolutely nothing. Yet randomly this guy opens up. 'I feel shitty today' he would tell me. Part of being a writer it what I always assumed, he tends to go off on a whim. Yet even to that extent I rarely know why is is that he feels the way he does, I just kind of understand. An odd mutual understanding of our crappy moods. If you were to look at the transcript for our conversations it would probably play out l like an info feed from twitter or facebook.
Josh is confused. Kevin is crappy. Josh is wondering why. Kevin is excited about his new Wii. Josh is feeling blue, etc. Yet where does it go, or does it need to go anywhere. It's kind of like being on the receiving end of a random cry for help, both ways. Total annominity in the worst way. Yet internet is an amazing thing. There are a few others who I have this sort of akward specialness about our conversations with, yet I can't quite figure out what to say sometimes. Even though I know some of you, I still feel like a creepy stranger.
It happens in real life too though. Like this person who I use to live with is getting married soon, and I've never been to a wedding let alone invited that wasn't my family. I don't know what it's like to be invited into someone's circle of friends. As much as I know of people, and the events in there lives I was shown just how one-sided it was; I've realized I'm not particularily close enough to anyone to stay in their life in this way and it was depressing. It made me realize how much of my 'friendships' are just like the ones with random guy, Kevin. Just a little too shallow for anyone's liking. So...
...Today I reorganized my buddy list.
Today I deleted a few people. Something I don't normally do.
Today I decided I want fewer friends I don't really feel connected to, and a little more solid people in my life.