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Saturday, March 15, 2014

Connections

I realised  - not all that recently - that most of the friends I have at this stage of my life are online.

That's fine. I'm 42, I'm old enough and ugly enough to not care if people are going to judge me for that. I have two people that I count as some of my closest friends and I've only met one of them in person.

The other lives in Canada.

I live most of my social life online - on twitter, generally, in fandoms, and a little bit on tumblr.

And, once again, that's fine with me. I'm content. I have a healthy family, a good job where I work with good people, and I have hobbies that more than enrich my own inner life.

Oh, and cats. I have cats.

A few years ago, a real life friend of mine mentioned she hadn't seen BBC's Sherlock, and I happened to have just bought series 1 on DVD. We decided to have a watching-night and so regular Saturday night stitching-and-watching dates were born.

We do them at her place - she's not fond of cats and she's the caregiver for her mother who has Alzheimer's. We buy ice creams, we watch TV and we stitch and talk.

And, as absolutely fine as I am with most of my life lived online, balance is also a good thing. Meaning that it's good for me to be forced to leave my house once a week for something other than work, and to interact with someone I'm neither related to nor work with face-to-face.

We don't do much. We watch things like The Amazing Race and Survivor, and we stitch and talk, and drink tea.

But in this oh-so-fragmented modern world - that as I say I have no problem with, it's  where I live most of the time - a real-life, real-time friend connection is beyond important.




3 comments:

Ana S. said...

<3

As you know I spend a lot of my time on the Internet as well, but yes, getting to do that is lovely and irreplaceable.

Marg said...

The vast majority of my closest friends are online and I have never met them. Some of them know way more about me than people in 'real' life.

It is always good though to catch up face to face too. Balance is the key.

Maree said...

Ana: <3 <3 It really is :-)

Marg: I'm working on it, it's an ongoing thing always. :D