Friendship is Weird

Good morning folks. I am going to drop my usual “morning friends” business but I will talk about that a bit later. First off I am failing you because the well has officially run dry. I made it through twenty mixtapes for MixTape Mondays, before ultimate running out of juice. You can always view the archives here, but I am uncertain if or when this series is going to return. It was a pretty good run and I am fairly proud of some of the blends of music that I presented, but also more or less out of creative juice when it comes to music. That said it still serves as one of my longest-running series, so I guess there is that. Instead this morning I am going to talk a bit about the nature of friendship and the internet. I had something happen yesterday that once again reminded me that internet relations are not necessarily guaranteed to be a two-way street. More specifically this is referred to as “Parasocial Relationships” and I have even blogged about this construct before in the past. However I myself just allowed myself to get bit by that and I feel this mixture of stupidity, shame, and sadness. This is not a drama blog, so I am not going to go into details… because quite honestly they are pretty boring. Ultimately it was someone I tried to be friends with and has once again shown me that I am not really in that group for them. I am a pretty simple monkey as far as monkeys go. I use the word “friend” pretty liberally, and start off posts with “morning friends” because quite honestly if you are here on the regular it seems like you are at least interested in me as a human being. I’ve never stuck to a single topic long enough to really be a “theme” blogger, even though this blog once upon a time started off that way. Sure when I am on a Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft bender… this becomes a blog where I almost exclusively talk about that one thing. However, if you are going to stick around for more than a few articles here or there, my assumption is that you at least on some level care about me as a human being. If that is the case I count you as a friend, which is a term with a lot of gradation to it. I try to meet everyone with the possibility of making a brand new lifelong friend. I grew up as an only child and worse… an only child living out in the country separated by any possibility for neighbor children to play with. I wanted nothing more than a sibling, but that never came to fruition so while I spent copious amounts of time entertaining myself… I always wanted to be able to hang out with another human being. Granted I am very BAD at doing so because oftentimes my idea of that is “you go do whatever you want to do, and I will do whatever I want to do… but we will technically be inhabiting the same space”. After years of fining that entertaining myself skill, I am usually off doing my own thing but can be summoned forth for shenanigans at a moment’s notice. This also means that I often cast a pretty wide net when it comes to trying to invite people into my world. Where I fail miserably as a human being, is that because I am constantly inviting people into my “monkeysphere“… I am usually doing a pretty shit job of checking in on the people who are already there. This is especially true when more recently I have been in a bit of a funk and I am trying desperately not to fall into one. That means I have reverted into a “speak when spoken to” sort of mode when it comes to human interactions. I’ve kept my head down and focused on my dumb objective of getting everything to level 80 in Final Fantasy XIV and also planning a bit for New World, but otherwise been fairly oblivious to the world around me. I have no idea what necessarily I did to make me unworthy of friendship, but I also don’t necessarily have to know. People gotta do whatever is best for themselves, and that is true even if it means that I can’t be part of that adventure. I am not a great friend. I know this. I keep putting myself out there but once I have made that first contact and invited people into my madness… the whole only-child thing kicks in and I have no fucking idea whatsoever to do with them once I have roped them in. Often times it is a situation of exhausting myself of social energy just in working up the moxie to make that first contact, that I have none left for when they shockingly seem interested. That doesn’t mean I am going to stop trying, however, and I do have a group of folks who have managed to put up with my bullshit for long enough that they are permanent fixtures of my world. I guess I am just constantly searching for more people who might also be “drift compatible”. So mostly this morning’s post is being melancholic, at least trying to get it out of my system. That said I also think it is important that you the reader understand that when I am using the word friend in a blog post I am being sincere… or at least as sincere as I know how to be. I am a deeply flawed human being, but this isn’t some marketing ploy to get you to subscribe to my pyramid scheme… although when I go into recruiting for a new game it very much DOES start to seem like a sales pitch. Ultimately I seek connections because I don’t really want to be alone, even if I have no clue how to actually be the sort of friend that normal human beings are. I wish I did not allow the actions of others, that I have zero control over… to deflate the wind from my sails but I guess that is also part of being me as well. I get my hopes up and also get them dashed… sometimes without anyone realizing they actually did it. I’ve made it to forty-five and am not sure if I know another way to exist. If you’ve made it this far in the post, I salute you. I probably would have stopped reading several paragraphs ago. I hope you all have a great week and hopefully tomorrow I will return to my regularly scheduled nonsense. Today however I had to be a bit sad over something I have no real right to be sad about. My blog is oftentimes how I work through things, and hopefully, after making this post I can toss some topsoil over it and be done with it for a while. The post Friendship is Weird appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.