I struggle with my place in this universe. When I was a child I was at the center, but have drifted further and further away as the years have passed.
If you are reading this, you are one of just a handful of people curious enough to know what's going on in my life, to take the time to visit me here. You are a very special group, one I'll call "my favorite people". I dare use the word "friend", for that word has lost all meaning to me.
The dictionary defines the word "friend" as a person that you know well and regard with affection and trust. I think I should have used this definition when I friended people on Facebook. Maybe I wouldn't have developed this false sense of popularity.
But you don't want to insult someone when they send you a friend request, so you accept requests from people who are hardly acquaintances, some who collect Facebook friends like baseball cards.
The first time I joined FB, I accepted friend requests from my 14erWorld contacts and that got out of hand very quickly. So I deleted my account and started over, this time being a little more selective in my "friends", but not exactly meeting that dictionary definition above.
Then I started this blog and I put a lot of work into it. I collected and displayed all my favorite images from my mountaineering days, my peak lists, and put together a little bit of my history of my interests and accomplishments.
I was excited and anxious to share it with my FB friends, but hugely disappointed when hardly anybody bothered to check it out. It was as if that extra mouse click separated my FB friends from my real friends. And it wasn't just a fluke. I tried this experiment over and over again with the same results.
There was even one FB friend who was a nurse and asked in a FB message for details of my bicep injury. But when I told her to go to my blog for the details, she balked. I guess she wanted me to type it all over again just for her.
So before deleting the new FB account, I told all my friends who followed me that I had a blog, and I mention it at the bottom of all my outgoing emails. Everybody who knows me, knows where to find me.
The moral of this story is to know who your friends are, and don't waste your time on people who don't give a shit about what you are doing.
Later,
Steve
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