My buddy Matt was here this week for a conference. We met in college and became good friends, and through the magic of technology have been able to keep up with one another’s major live shifts and locations and see photos of each other drunk at parties.
It’s funny how friendships seem to have totally changed with the advent of Facebook and Twitter and FaceSpace and whatevertheeff. People I never thought I’d connect with or have anything in common with when we were physically living down the hall from each other, I have found to be fascinating, cool, interesting people. Some people who I considered to be too cool to ever want to be my friend, it turns out, for some reason felt the same way about me, and it took the relative remove of the internet for us to overcome that initial barrier of mutual intimidation. Other people with whom I spent loads of time and with whom I had loads in common drifted off in one direction, me in the other, and while we keep flashing signals at each other - "You okay?" "Yep! Fine! There’s fish over here! You?" - we are on wildly divergent paths that may carry us to a place where Facebookage is the exact level of friendship that we have, and that’s okay. Some of the people I spent a lot of time with, I miss so deeply that even getting to monitor their tiny little day-in-day-out adventures isn’t enough except that it has to be.
It’s interesting to me how this all plays out. I find that while I’m glad I have these cyber tools to keep track of people, a kind of three-dimensional graph in my mind of everyone’s movements and how they’re doing and what they believe politically, nothing really beats what I got to do today, which is to take my good friend Matt to the Red Cup here in Oklahoma City for lunch, and sit and talk to him about how great I’m doing, and how great he’s doing, and whether or not he’s going to go down this one path that opened up or this other one, and aren’t weddings just the worst? And remember that time in college when? Oh yeah, I remember that it was so funny, and you wouldn’t even recognize so-and-so now, he’s gotten so crazy, but Crazy McNutsface is now sane and normal as can be and we hung out last week. Nothing beats that, and for the next week or more I’ll be smiling to remember it.
Matt left to go back after we had lunch, and is now driving back to Atlanta in a rented car, so shoot a prayer skyward that he makes it there safely. Meantime, those of you who know me really and cyberreally, leave me a comment. I’m doing fine here in middle America - great even - and I had the #4 at Red Cup, which is where I’ll take you if you ever find yourself in Oklahoma City, and I’ll recommend you have the #4 too, because it’s this grilled cheese sandwich with slices of green apple and onion and it is SO GOOD.
But enough about me. How are you?
