After the low ebb that the weekend started on, my faith in life, the universe and everything in general has been somewhat restored.
As may have been noted by my earlier post this weekend, for some unknown reason I seemed to run out of cheer and motivation. It’s happened a few times recently and I’m starting to notice the signs before it happens - it’s characterised by my level of cynicism going up, and becoming detached from any interest in things happening around me. I also start to react against things I would normally put up with - like people moaning about insignificant things.
Small things start to aggravate me when I’m not doing well. Thinking back, one of my friends once said that when I’m up, I “shine”. I think I know what she meant - I do have the capacity to lift people and others seem to gravitate towards me sometimes. I always put it down to me being shy as a child, and tending to over-compensate in group situations. Perhaps it really is more than that though - perhaps the celestine prophecy was right, and I pump energy out? It would probably explain why my body runs hot most of the time - I always have warm hands. If ever I’m cold, W becomes really worried - it just never happens. Maybe I missed my vocation as a healer…
Anyway - I’m getting sidetracked (and very introspective).
After surfing profiles of interesting and varied people on Yahoo 360 and MySpace last night, and messsaging one or two of them (trying not to sound too needy), I got up this morning and discovered a couple had added me as friends.
While online messing around this afternoon - mainly due to the weather being so foul outside - I bumped into one of the people I messaged, and we slowly got to know one another.
It’s a strange experience when you first start talking to a stranger on any of the instant messaging systems. I’m probably easier to talk to than most because I have no “act” - the person they find is just me. It probably makes me appear straightforward at first - because I take an interest in others. I’m a terrible people watcher, and it must extend to meeting people - I will usually feed the prompts and end up hearing people’s life stories. Everybody ends up winning because the person I’m talking to thinks I’m a great listener, and I get to hear their story.
So - following an afternoon of firing messages backwards and forwards, and finding out we have common interests, I have a new friend on the net! I’m trying not to be too giddy - although I read perhaps 20 personal blogs on a regular basis, I would only count about 5 people now as real “friends” that I will spend the time of day with, and help out, listen to, and so on.
Of my little online circle of friends there is one in London, two in the USA, and two in Germany - quite an international mix. My oldest online friend is one of the people in the US - we met when I used to run the ThoughtCafe website (about 5 years ago), and almost met up in America - we missed each other by 24 hours at the Neibaum Coppola winery in the Napa Valley.
Perhaps my closest online friend lives out in cowboy country, USA, and is thinking about coming over to visit us in England - maybe later this year. We met through a love of books and writing, and hit it off straight away. As Forrest Gump would have said “we was like carrots and peas”. We still are. It’s scary.
While doing things - like writing this blog - it makes me wonder if the engineers who started putting the internet together years ago had any idea of the social networking it would enable. The world has become very much smaller. Despite the various conflicts going on around the world, I can’t help thinking the internet has made it a little bit more friendly. Sure, there are hackers, and viruses, and all kinds of other terrible things out there, but there are also real people, with real lives, and people have a habit of finding each other. “Life finds a way”