Has anybody here seen my old friend [first name last name]?
The Bleat.:It’s infuriating how people fade away or sink into the deep, and there’s nothing you can do. There was a Great Divergence many years ago, and the social order forced in the basement of the Valli Pub fractured. Now. You may well think it’s preposterous to assume these things wouldn’t happen, since life consists of such fissures: grade school friends are lost to middle school, high school friends lost in the great new wave of college, college roommates forgotten when the workplace and the post-college claque of 20s-somethings takes over, and then this batch abandoned when kids and the Real Job and all the other anchors of adulthood are draped around your neck.
I know exactly what he's talking about. Because of the splintered time-line of my life, with all its moves and job changes (not to mention the peculiar nature of Minnesotans) there are a lot of people in my life who have just...vanished. I'm pretty sure most of them are still alive; I see traces of some of them on the internet, but they're just out of reach.
The Internet has fixed this to a certain extent, and I am grateful to Facebook for putting me back in touch with some of my friends from high school and the Army; it has also been a useful tool for staying in touch with my Anime Detour and Convergence peeps from Minnesota. Still, there are folks who hover out there somewhere on the internet like satellites in a distant orbit; we're aware of each others' existence but don't talk often, if at all. I wonder how much of that is because I'm not prone to pestering people. If we have stuff in common, then I'm very interested in getting together and doing that stuff, or at least talking about it, but if all we have in common is the fact that we were at the same high school thirty years ago, well, we may not have a whole lot to talk about. I sometimes wonder if this is the reason I'm not that close to my cousins. We've been living different lives in different places and don't have a whole lot in common except for blood. It may be thicker than water, but you can only talk about your relatives for so long.
I know exactly what he's talking about. Because of the splintered time-line of my life, with all its moves and job changes (not to mention the peculiar nature of Minnesotans) there are a lot of people in my life who have just...vanished. I'm pretty sure most of them are still alive; I see traces of some of them on the internet, but they're just out of reach.
The Internet has fixed this to a certain extent, and I am grateful to Facebook for putting me back in touch with some of my friends from high school and the Army; it has also been a useful tool for staying in touch with my Anime Detour and Convergence peeps from Minnesota. Still, there are folks who hover out there somewhere on the internet like satellites in a distant orbit; we're aware of each others' existence but don't talk often, if at all. I wonder how much of that is because I'm not prone to pestering people. If we have stuff in common, then I'm very interested in getting together and doing that stuff, or at least talking about it, but if all we have in common is the fact that we were at the same high school thirty years ago, well, we may not have a whole lot to talk about. I sometimes wonder if this is the reason I'm not that close to my cousins. We've been living different lives in different places and don't have a whole lot in common except for blood. It may be thicker than water, but you can only talk about your relatives for so long.