Tag Archives: connections

It’s hard to feel safe

Posted on by Sherri
7

A couple of months ago, a couple from my town, Tecumseh, OK, was murdered in Arizona by some escaped convicts. One convict was captured fairly quickly, but the other one and his girlfriend/cousin were on the lam for a little while. They made it to Meteetsee, WY, where they were captured. This is weird for me, because my Internet friend Yellowcat lives there. They could have chosen anywhere in the world to go, but they were captured in the actual town where a person on my blogroll lives. Now that’s what I call a coincidence. It’s not like I have hundreds of readers, and only one of them lives in Wyoming. Think of all the things that had to happen to connect me to a random Internet friend in such a way. Weird and sad.

Another violent event which touched me, of course, was the subject of my previous post. The two men who locked down my entire town for most of a day blame their crime spree on drugs. One is remorseful, and I feel sorry for him; I hope he gets treatment. The other is acting like a shit, so I hope he gets a beating sees the error of his ways someday.

Well now there’s been a torture/rape/murder involving people from my hometown of Prague, OK. The guy they arrested was a year behind me in school; his sister, also arrested, was in my brother’s class; the man they found dead is the same age as my step-daughter, but I don’t recognize the name so I don’t know if he went to school with her; and they haven’t released the female victim’s name yet, I guess because she survived and they’re protecting her.

And these are just the things with a direct connection to me. Other crazy things have happened in my area that just a couple of years ago would have seemed impossible. Things like these don’t happen in my world. It’s going to take some getting used to, this feeling I have a target on my back.

Didn’t mean for this to be a bummer, sorry!

Online connections are human connections

Posted on by Sherri
9

On Facebook, they have these memes circulating, where you ask your friends to describe you in one word, or tell a memory they have about you. I usually avoid the memes because they feel faintly narcissistic (can’t believe I spelled that right on the first try)–not when others do them, but for me, yeah. I’m always harder on myself than I am on others. Anyway, last night I did one that seemed fairly harmless: How did we meet? I am saddened by how little I remember, and amazed by how much others do. It was a fun exercise.

I realized that I have three main time periods in my circle of everyday buddies, and those are high school, college and blog, i.e. the past 3–4 years. There’s a biiiiig, empty space between college and blog. It’s not that I was completely isolated, I worked during most of that time, but the demands of family life kept me from creating a lasting bond, I suppose. It’s hard to make friends when you can’t just hang out and have fun.

That’s why I hate it when people dismiss online relationships out of hand, or even ridicule them as pathetic. When online communication started years ago, it was generally accepted that relationships online were pretty much meaningless. After all, you’re not really talking and interacting with a human, just words on a screen. I’ve found, though–and I think a lot of other people have, too–that the interactions we have with each other online can be just as meaningful as real life friendships. Is it healthy for online connections to replace real-life ones? Probably not. But can they be a supplement, enriching your life in countless ways? Indubitably. (That word took three tries.) No matter how cynics enjoy reducing solely-Internet friendships to their electrons, there is a human being sending his or her intentions to you. The method in which you receive those intentions doesn’t matter much.

Granted, it’s harder to know what those intentions are without body language and inflection, but it’s like having a hundred pen pals. And for someone like me, with limited opportunities to interact face-to-face with people who share my interests, this has worked pretty well. Don’t you agree?