This thing of ours

In My Humble Opinion
1

This thing of ours, this cosa nostra…, I think it’s having some impact on my life (rather than using “impact” as a verb - I guess that’s OK now, huh?).

It could all go poof on a moment’s notice, should the Chicago Reader decide we’re an expensive PITA.

I look at my life, and I’m trying to plan “RL” engagements that must be interwoven with Dopefests.

ACK! I’m not alone. I know I’m not alone.

But I still feel like this is all a bit surreal.

I’ve met hundreds of y’all! Am I friends with any of you? Boy, is this self-indulgent or what?

Yes. Some of you are, by now, friends. I think.

Observing Doper life, and interactions to which I’m privy, I easily see that I’m not as forthcoming as a lot of y’all. I watch, I observe, and I think my social skills are in fine lubrication, but I certainly avoid engagement on a personal level.

While I’ve devoted much of the last few years to staying in touch with y’all, I think I’m holding people at bay.

Hmmm…, what am I trying to say? One of y’all’s going to help me out.

2

Um.

Huh?

3

I agree completely.

With SnoopyFan.

You have a long night at the bar, Ringo?

4

Ditto… :confused:

5

Friends that you have no intention of ever meeting? I feel like that all the time (although that’s another thread entirely!).

I’ve never met an on-line person in real life. Ever. It kind of freaks me out to think about it. I feel the same way about radio personalities. I don’t want to meet them because I have a vision of that person in my head and if the reality doesn’t match the mental image, I’m liable to wig out.

Or maybe you just had a long night at the bar.

6

Kalhoun, see that’s why we don’t know what the heck he’s talking about. Hundreds of people have met him face-to-face. Hell, I’ve met him I think three times.

7

Gorgon, met, isn’t the same as know. I think that is the bee in Ringo’s bonnet. He seems to see his relationships with fellow dopers still as acquaintance-level instead of friend-level. Lots of polite nodding and smalltalk, but the real heart-to-heart stuff isn’t happening. When you stop and look at the amount of time some of our regulars put into this virtual community, to look at it and say “I’m not sure I have one person out of this entire group that I could really say I have a close friendship with” it seems to kick off a bit of thought about what you’re really spending your time on. If you spent the amount of time with people IRL that we spend together on the boards then you’d be in serious “best friends” territory.

I feel the same way sometimes. I’ve met a fair number of dopers, and I genuinely like most of them, but the off-board contact, the genuine person-to-person connections are fairly rare. Conversations in face-to-face meetings become extensions of SDMB threads instead of actual heart-to-hearts. Having previously been a member of a community based around a shared interest, I see the same kind of attachements-of-convenience in Internet-based communities. When there is a gathering there is plenty of fun to be had and good times, but once the gathering is over, the contact drops to zero again. The number of people who experience genuine connections and meet when there isn’t a Dopefest and actually grow their friendships to the point where they share more than the common interest in the SDMB is pretty small.

My own experience was with the Magic: the Gathering community. I would attend a weekly gaming session and I made a fair number of friends. People who I would see at the events, talk with, trade with, grab some lunch with, etc. Still, although we may have had far more in common and had the potential to connect on more than that one level, we never seemed to. So if they stopped playing, or one of us stopped going to the events, then the friendship evaporated. The only link was the mutual interest, and it was a damn shame in some cases becuase some of those were really good people that I would love to count as a friend today. I am certain we would connect on many other levels, but we just never went outside the box of the shared interest to explore other areas where we may have strengthened our friendship. Maybe we were shy, maybe we just didn’t feel comfortable taking the risk of talking about something that the other person may or may not be receptive to. Maybe we’re afraid of judgement. Still, as often as not, in the groups where a single shared interest(even one as diverse as the topics on the SDMB) was the primary motivation for the majority of the participants it was still remarkably impersonal once you got outside the realm of the shared interest.

Ships passing in the night with nothing in common except their current location. If one, or both, of these ships would make the effort to change course to where they were both on the same heading for a bit they would discover tons of commonalities once a few suns had risen and set. It’s not a question of how many people you’ve met, it’s a question of how many did you connect with. How many of those meetings did that elusive flower known as friendship really take root in?

I “know” a fair number of Dopers in my geographic area. I “know” a few from outside the area. Taking that to the next level, and becoming friends has happened with only a couple. I think this may be the type of thing Ringo is talking about.

Enjoy,
Steven

8

Theres about 2 people I’d ever truly meet in person, that I’ve met online. I’ve known them both for about two years or so, online. I’ve talked to one of them on the phone quite a bit, and the other has my phone number but hasn’t called. Otherwise, I stay away from chat rooms and the such, and I wouldn’t go out looking for someone online purposely to get to be friends then meet. It just happened the way it did, with me.

9

Point taken Mtgman. There are several Dopers I know IRL and consider actual friends, but a great many folks here don’t get out that much, meet that much, or even want to meet at all, so I’m not really in the same way.

10

Ringo, I think your brain is creating a confusing set of facts for you:

  1. You spend a good bit of time at this place, and that time with any person or group of people would have made them very close to you, and vice versa.

  2. However, you’re not as close to a lot of the people here as you’d think you’d be from the time we’ve spent online and in person with you.

This has created the following feeling inside you:

Since you’re not as … able to relax around us as others are (I, for one, am able to relax almost totally when I’m around dopers. Noise level aside, I could take a nap at a dopefest, shower, etc. I’m at home at them), your mind translates this into a lack of comfort around us/knowledge of how much you can relax/talk/have a few more drinks than you might.

Add to that the fact that, as you said, you avoid engagement on a personal level (such as going out to dinner or a bar with One of your many friends from around the country:)), and I can certainly see why it creates a sort of (the sense I get from your OP) “Do I know any of these people as well as I might? Am I not getting enough out of dopefests?” situation. To which I say:

I think you have seen by now that you can relax at gatherings. I mean, if I, someone who has had serious trust/social issues in the past, am able to relax to the extent that I can (and do!) at fests, I think you could too. I’m not trying to measure you with me as a guideline so much as reassure you that, in the words of James Taylor, “You can close your eyes, it’s alright.” You don’t need to be the most social person everywhere, but you also don’t need to feel that you need to do more if you feel comfortable. For some of us there is this drive to be very very social at fests. For others, sort of lurking in the back and watching is more where the comfort level is.

Does that help?

11

iampunha, I’m not sure it is the “at a fest” part of the equation Ringo is having issues with. I think it’s the “between fests” part that is bugging him. I think he feels “engagement on a personal level” is necessary to build the kind of friendships that actually bridge dopefests instead of simply popping in and out of existance whenever there is a fest. The first bit of his post seems to indicate that he’s not sure very many of his Doper-friendships would survive if the SDMB went away. How many of the friendships have transcended the level of “friends because we share a mutual interest” and into the level of “friends because we genuinely care about each other and enjoy each other’s company.” I experienced something similar with my “MtG friends”. Although they were good people, I just never connected with them on a level deeper than the mutual interest. When the mutual interest went away, so did many of those friendships. To me this seems to be Ringo’s fear as well. If the SDMB went away, what would happen to the friendships he’s formed with other dopers? Would they survive? Would he still be able to call any number of the hundreds of dopers around the country he’s met and chat with them

Of course, barring further input from the man himself, your guess that the issue Ringo is struggling with is feeling able to open up and relax at RL gatherings is every bit as good as mine.

Enjoy,
Steven

12

Heh. Yes, Gorgon Heap, it was a long night at the bar, spent with three other dopers in fact.

Your thoughts are appreciated iampunha, but I think, if anything, I may have become a little too relaxed at a gathering or two :slight_smile: . I don’t usually use a sig, but one that seems appropriate to this point fell in my lap last week. So, no, I’m not concerned with my social skills.

Mtgman, wham! You hit that nail pretty squarely in the head. We had talked about the potentially transient nature of the SDMB social phenomenon at the bar thursday night. It could all go poof! And I have devoted much time to it. For all that I’ve met I can think of maybe a dozen dopers whose last names I know, none of whom live in Houston. Combined with ancillary developments in my off-board social life (one buddy’s got custody of his son now and has become full-time Mr. Mom, another’s got twin baby boys and is on a short leash until they’re in school, etc.), I’ve arrived at a point where I’m kinda fresh out of running buddies. Unlike most of my life so far, there’s not much of anybody I can just ring up and see if they want to go shoot some pool tonight.

Some of it’s me, apparently:

Maybe I need to get married, or something.

Thanks, all, for the thoughts. Steven, you made some excellent observations. Well, that’s my self-indulgent thread for the month; I’ll now get back in to whatever sort of character I am around here.

13

Please Ringo, don not go “poof” on us. That would be way too silly.

14

Ha! That made me laugh, Road Rash.

It also made me re-read the thread. That got me to wondering if there’s not some analogy between the relationships Mtgman describes above and those we encounter professionally. There’s no end of people that I’ve known for 10, 15, 20+ years with whom I have a good rapport, and with whom I’ve commiserated through divorces, job changes, death of a child, cancer, getting married again, etc. whom I know only through my work, and it would be distinctly weird for me to pop up in their off time lives.
Same thing? Not quite, but similar.

15

It sounds like you’re missing an emotional intimacy and connection that doesn’t necessarily happen with acquaintances or “work” friends or people you gather with because of one or two common elements. A connection that crosses where you are, what you are involved in, into who you are. There are people that connect on a different level, that see inside of you, connect with parts that are hidden to the outside world. And with those people, it really doesn’t matter which surface elements you have in common because they’ve made an internal connection. And that transcends physical and circumstantial proximity.

Hmmm, maybe I need to cut down on the deep roast coffee

16

Interesting thought - it blends well with what Steven said.