Monday, February 14, 2005

Online Exchanges

Friendships Online, friendships that began online and continue through writing without the natural support of voice and actual, live, physical presence are possible, I suppose, but in my experience, rare. I've been online beginning in 1996, but I lived in Mexico from 1997 to 2001. Recently, when I was offline for two weeks I received a phone call from someone I'd known, and admired Online, but when I heard his voice I felt much more certain that we could be friends. (He wanted to know what happened to me, ha!)


Online we can't give out too much information about ourselves. I give out much more, I believe, than is sensible, but I won't stop.


Many months ago a poster I've hated for years posted a photo of herself. Instantly I felt I had a bead on who she was, where she was psychologically.  A bit later she let on that her glitzy eyeglasses were two prescriptions ago, from which it wasn't hard to deduce she was now actually much older. Only now, after one more clue, has it dawned on me that she is confined to a wheelchair. I looked again at the photo. Her head is at an angle to the camera, an angle I'm familiar with from photos of others wheelchair-bound. Stephen Hawking, for example.


So in the case of people one can't get along with online there very often must be some missing piece of information that might change the whole relationship. One of my oldest and dearest friends, who I frquently visited, Laurel Nisbet, was confined to an iron lung for 37 years until she died in August, 1985. My own mother died in an iron lung when I was 14.  A close friend I never met except on line, Jeannie, SN Sissug, died after a long illness compounded by an irregular heart beat.  Most of the time in her posts she was as merry as a singing canary. I loved her. Never met her. Never spoke on the phone. We were simply sympatico.


It's wise, I suppose, to be cautious making friends with those too needy. Some extreme neediness is masked by extraordinary hostility. One would have to be a psychiatrist to understand such 'shooting from ambush.' In some cases it might be associated with adult autism, or Kleinfelter's syndrome, both of which are marked by asocial behaviour.


Friends. Real friends, as Polonius advised his son,


    "The friends thou hast, their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel"


This is a beautiful day: enjoy it!


Barry


 


 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Barry...been trying to figure why no one has commented on this lovely entry called "online exchanges"....Then duh, (blonde and southern here)..I realize, "neither have I"...For me, who has read this more than once..It sends me away, deep and far into my own memories, of online as well as offline friendships..and while I am off in "dreamland"..I forget to say "THANK YOU" for this entry...so THANK YOU.               all my love, kristlebleu

Anonymous said...

Thank you kristlebleu. -Barry