Warning: There's a good chance this post is going to, in the end, kind of make me look like a crazy person. I'm okay with that.
We had such a good time last night! Wanna see?
Robyn, Valerie, me, and Kelly, photo by Valerie's (superadorable) husband. (Sorry, Valerie, is that inappropriate? But he IS cute.) We're missing two; by the time we got to photos, we'd already lost Chris and Phoebe. Boo. But it was a blast (and I was the only one who had the sangria, and I'm totally okay with that) and these girls were all charming and fun and funny and it was such a joy to meet all of them and yay!
We did tone it down for another picture:
I was thinking last night - it was a bit of a drive home, so I had too much idle time in my head - about friendship in the Internet age. A lot of things about friendship have changed. For example, you don't have to have actually MET someone to feel connected to them. (Case in point, the fact that I STILL cannot sing that stupid Anne Murray song without thinking about Laurie and her kitty Roy and starting to sob.) And your own close personal friends may not be as tuned in to every tiny detail of your daily life as blog readers whom you've never even met! (Well, that's unless you're one of those people who very carefully balances things and keeps your personal life out of your blog. I am completely not one of those people.)
Have you ever been having a conversation with someone and you just blurt out something about your friend Rosi (picking on you, girl) and then realize that you really hope no one asks much more about your friend Rosi, because you'd have to try to gloss over the fact that you've not, in fact, MET Rosi? And yet, there are bound to be people in your circle of readers/readees who you would readily consider friends. I'm really grateful that when someone walked into my office two days ago and found me crying over the death of the pet of a total stranger, it was someone who's also a cat nut and pretty much understood it (and started to tear up herself when I explained what my problem was.) But other people would think it was just plain crazy to care/talk so much about people who don't exist in your physical world.
When I told Travis about my plans for Rhinebeck, which may include crashing at a friend's place, whom I originally "met" because she was my Secret Pal, he furrowed his brow just a bit. "And she's cool with that? I mean, you don't know each other." But of course we do!! He gets it...but I'm not sure he GETS it. And sometimes I wonder if I'm overreaching; is it okay for me to be all excited about the pregnancy of someone who's nine states away? Across the country? Not even IN the same country?
Also, it's easier to say "friend" than "this girl I met through a knitting swap who is in some of my Ravelry groups, and we exchange e-mails a lot and send each other random stuff in the mail sometimes" and that may be because there are so very many things in that longer phrase that regular non-knitting people are just not going to understand. (Please don't ever tell them I stalked a person called the Yarn Harlot. I'm pretty sure I'd get shunned completely; I might even lose my job.)
I digress; a friend is someone with whom you share a connection, something in common, and for whom you have warm feelings. And you don't have to have actually stood right next to a person to get that anymore...in an age of blogs, Myspace, Internet dating, and other advances in interpersonal communication, I don't think that actual physical presence is a high priority anymore in the list of requisites for friendship.
I guess what I'm saying is, thanks for reading and I hope you don't mind when I talk about you as my friends. *end cheese*
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