Human Contact Is So Last Season...

Created this blog several days ago and have logged in every day since to stare into its emptiness. Once or twice I hovered the cursor over "new post" and pulled back at the last second. Fear? Doubt? Regret?

Mostly, startled by unfamiliar surroundings. Your classic "I hope they like me" jitters. And then it dawned on me:

Girlfriend, nobody's there!

So opening confession: my motives for joining ranks of Blogland are not entirely pure. Desperation led me here. Seems this upstart self-expression movement, with its innocent little mug, has a ravenous thirst for attention, namely that belonging to my closest friends. And oh, they are paying it all right.

But what you may not know is that Attention, like fossil fuels, exists in a finite quantity. Each of us only has so much to spend. So we must budget it.

A little here, a lot there. Maybe we squirrel some away to spend on special occasions. Sometimes we all just have to phone it in to satisfy some niggling obligation - refilling a prescription or getting our teeth cleaned. Do it and get back to work.

My point: attention, as a commodity, is exhaustible. This is where a little concept called prioritization comes into play.

Have gotten off track, and I so did not want to open my sweet, innocent little bloggy-blog with a rant. Plenty of time for that later.

To explain: I grew up with three very close friends, each from a different part of my life, each very special to me in a unique way. We'll call them Friend A, Friend B, Friend C. This will offend them, but seeing as I do not rank any acknowledgement whatsoever in their electronic worlds, that's just too bad. And anyway, have decided not to tell them right away that I am here...

So. Friend A and I bonded over artistic pursuit, bad home situations, and a common thirst for education. Friend B was my partying pal - and we had ourselves a really good time back in the day. We loved boys and rock music, and most of all rock boys. Were never the wildest, but we held our own.

Friend C...Friend C for most of my life I have considered Home. No matter what other ridiculous identities we may have been trying on with other people, with each other we could totally be ourselves. Good or bad. So we talked about art, and books, and parents, and boys, and rock music. And we ate ice cream on Saturday night and watched the Golden Girls.

Fast forward to now...surely I am mature and intelligent enough to know that one cannot go on eating ice cream every Saturday night with friends for eternity. We are all grownups with lives. This is so not the problem.

Trouble began with the Internet.

Friend A currently sports something like a hundred bazillion "friends"-in electronic form-with whom she shares what I'm sure are quite meaningful give and take relationships. In fact, quite a few of them have earned the distinction of "dear/close friend." Huh! Of course, I haven't warranted so much as a phone call in probably 4 months.

Friend C actually was the person to introduce blog to me, a few years ago now, while she was having a real live conversation with me (!)...seemed a bit put out with the telling of her own anecdote, tossed in the statement "I wrote about it in my blog." As though I would understand that. Probably took three more instances like that before she realized I did NOT understand and sent me a link. And so I came to know.

Since then I have watched from the outside as what started, I thought, as coping mechanism for trying experience she was enduring, bloomed into the mammoth, attention-sucking, life-dominating BFF that I'm sure it now considers itself. Even if she is not quite at that point. We still talk occasionally, but that whole finite attention supply thing?

Hello, I'm Niggling Obligation. And you are?

It's all very harsh, I know. Quite possible that I am overreacting. Not like I haven't tried to understand and deal with the presence of this new...cripe, it's not even a PERSON...in the dead center of my friends' lives. Have also tried whining, withdrawing in disgust (TOTALLY UNNOTICED), and even faithful reading of their online selves in a sincere attempt to adapt. Even tried a few cheery remarks to show that I'm reading them and hey, great stuff! In the end, I find it all quite invasive and freaky and disturbing.

So here I am. Hey, maybe eventually someone will be out there. Someone who will tell me I am a freaking crybaby. Or who will say "Amen, sister! Speak it!" Heaven knows what I am going to write about. I promise you this: I will NOT be here every day (take that, NaBloPoMo!)

Who knows? It could be that you, coy little Internet, are the BFF I have always dreamed of. Do you like chocolate chip?