Single Serving Friends

That’s pretty deep. You will probably have a lot of people thinking about this. I know I have recently more-or-less checked out of another forum I used to be very active in.

-- Maplewood, MN

Very interesting questions Tom. Online relationships, like face to face relationships are remarkably dynamic. For my part, online friends start very contextual and sometimes grow to more, sometimes not. The people I enjoy here have not quite made it to the official friend category (but are the best potential I’ve ever seen) for a variety of reasons; single point of contact, lack of time, limited opportunity to go beyond the initial subject.

The folks here are a strange (and I mean that in a good way) bunch. They seem to care about the people they interact with, and if they don’t they are very good at hiding it. Personally, I would welcome more contact, yet there is hesitation as I’m sure with others, that there may not be a connection beyond the one subject and typically, rejection follows that realization.

For the time being, I look forward to the interaction here, and enjoy the characters that inhabit this place. If the folks here are not as friendly as they seem and there is no chance for an extended connection, then I’ll be content pretending that there is more here than a “single serving.”

-- When you give someone a chance it may well be their last.

there’s a saying that I can never remember exactly but it’s something like people coming into your life for a reason (short term), a season (a longer duration) and … something else which is a lifetime relationship. Whether it’s in the 2D world or the 3D world, I think it is the same.

Sometimes we hit it off with someone because we have a similar interest… and then when that topic is covered we have nothing left to talk about.. or perhaps we find some quirks or beliefs that we just don’t find compatible to our own and we drift apart… sometimes it is simply time and priorities (and all of those other excuses for not staying in touch).

And then there are those relationships that fizzle for a while and then something brings them back into our lives for another “season”....

Here, in the 2D world, the friendships can be stronger than most in our lives because we are here due to the common interest that isn’t fleeting (for most anyway). We’re here to talk wood. Can never be disappointed – the conversation will be about wood! If you don’t feel like talking about wood, you simply won’t log on.

The hard part about 2D friends is the “disappearance” – the not knowing what has happened to him/her.. not being able to find out because you may not even know their real name…... one day they post a comment and then the next….....

When my friend and I first started chatting (many, many years ago) we called ourselves pioneers in the chat world. It was true. This is a whole new realm that we are yet to fully understand.

thanks for the philosophical contemplation.

-- "Functional WoodArt" by Debbie, Canada (http://www.execulink.com/~yohan)

I’ve always pondered aquaintences virsus friends. I’m older than dirt and haven’t filled one hand with friends. Good topic which will draw a load of opinions. I cherish all my aquaintences Tom and am sure everyone else does also, but a friend you will know when you run across him/her for sure. It will be known by both of youj and you will never have to mention it. Semper Fi !

-- www.flickr.com/photos/egamarine/

at our last bonfire breakfast we were discussing “friends” and someone said that a friend will be there to stop you from getting yourself into trouble.. and a “good friend” will be getting into trouble right along with you.

-- "Functional WoodArt" by Debbie, Canada (http://www.execulink.com/~yohan)

The internet is a strange place indeed. I think, at least in some, our interests change a bit and we move on to greener pastures.

About five or six years ago I found myself head deep in playing internet golf (Links). I was a member of a few different sites and I was on at least 4 leader boards. I was playing 10 rounds a week, with different imaginary friends (as your wife puts it). Some guys I played with every week. Some just once in a while. There must have been hunderds over the time I was involved..But just one of all those guys have I actually stayed in contact with. We have never met. He is in Montana and I up here in Ontario Canada….. But for some reason, we just hit it off. I get e-mail from him all the time and I likewise send back. Funny, but I feel as close to him as many of my face to face friends. When his daughter got married, he asked if I could make it to the wedding. It didn’t happen, but I sure would have liked it to.

Your right, sometimes we just have to “cut bait”

-- Brian's Table Top Toys http://home.mountaincable.net/~bgraham/

Tom. You are an Imagined invisible friend. I haven’t seen your picture, so I guess you do not exist. No picture didn’t happen. I’ve seen your son riding his Christmas Horse, your shop so I guess they exist, unless they are pictures of Bob#2’s shop But then i don’t know if he exists either.

It is an interesting question. What makes us consider someone our friend, want to be around them, near them, miss them when they are not there, forget them.

Are our abilities to want everyone be a friend be so small that we can only consider one or two to be true friends. All others are acquaintances or ex-acquaintances., or never met.

I guess that if you never have anything in common, then I guess the only thing to talk about is how you don’t like the things they like. At least having one thing in common keeps you talking so that you can learn of their wives name, their children’s names. Maybe even their phone number so you can communicate a different way. Maybe an address. You are getting closer – they trust you enough to give you more information. But not enough for your credit card # and pin #.

Yes it’s an interesting question. But as for me it won’t keep me awake tonight. I’ll just be happy for the friends that I have today and rejoice in the ones I’ll have tomorrow.

-- Karson Southern Delaware karson_morrison@bigfoot.com

Some of my closest acquaintances are internet friends. They are the people that I most want to talk to when I’m driving for 5 hours in solitude. I’ve met some really great people, and the nice thing is, the jerks you come across go up in a puff of smoke as quick as you can hit the delete key.

The online friend is just really interesting to me. I can spend a fair amount of time yakking with someone online, yet have trouble filling 10 minutes of interaction with most people. My friends say it’s because I’m pretty hard to get along with, (keep it to yourself Bob,) but I get easily bored which makes internet friends so great. When I’m done talking, I can just walk away from the computer, and seemingly pick up where I left off hours or days later.

If I can find a real life friend like that, then you’d have something. Someone who asks you a question, you look at them, ponder it, walk away, come back four days later and reply as if they just said it. How grand that would be. (I’m mostly kidding of course.)

I wonder if this type of friendship is part of the death of common courtesy, though. The death of grammar, penmanship and basic writing skills. The death of appRopriate capitalization or the use of punctu,ation! The internet has certainly been the death of spelin. So is it now the death of courteous human interaction as well?

And what about the person that isn’t who they say they are at all? The “chairlift liar,” if you will. I ski alot, and I’ve met senators, and Disney animators, vascular surgeons and inventors. I’ve met people that I rode up with last weekend that were a vascular surgeon then, and now they are a Disney animator.

I wonder if this type of relationship is so superficial, that ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether they animated a Disney movie about a surgeon that became a senator. All of this can be a bond between fiction and non-fiction, containing elements of intentionally misspelled words and internet specific vernacular.

Very interesting.

-- You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. (Plato)

Ver….ry Interesting.

-- Karson Southern Delaware karson_morrison@bigfoot.com

The internet has also been the death of the capital I, i think.

-- Maplewood, MN

Somewhere in the seventies “i” quit knowing my neighbors. Was that me growing up or did something change? Kids use to play outside. We use to talk over back fences when mowing the lawn. Something about my world changed. I was at a kids birthday party last night and the TV was on the whole time with no one watching it. About 20 adults, half of us just sitting in a social stupor. I’m thinking it’s TV that killed common courtesy.

-- http://www.woodsongsfurniture.com

Well put, Tom. Some interesting points. It made me think about why I am here.

Probably the biggest attraction I had to this website initially is that it gives me an audience to show off my work to. I don’t have my work in galleries or stores and usually give pieces away as gifts. After spending so many hours, weeks, etc. on a piece of work, I would show it to a dozen or so family/friends and that’s it. I think it was Odie who ranted about the short comments (“that’s nice,” etc.) that people say on this website… well when it’s your family, well, how do I explain… I guess since they aren’t woodworkers, and they don’t know what went in to a project, they are easily impressed. At least at LumberJocks I can get an honest critique, ALONG with the much welcomed (at least to me) praise.

So I really enjoy having a place to display my work for an audience that is genuinely interested and has a varied level of experience with woodworking. The feedback is outstanding and I learn just as much from the feedback as I did from the process of building the project.

The other reason I am here is to just discuss woodworking. I love sharing ideas as a two way street. But getting back to your point, I guess making “friends” is sort of secondary. If it happens along the way, than that’s fine. But I wouldn’t try to force it, especially since it’s the internet. Like you said, usually the quicker any relationship starts, the quicker it ends. I think this is true across the board from internet buddies to marriages.

I do however, try to treat people that I meet on the net the same as I would treat people I met in a classroom setting or coworkers in an office: with respect, kindness, tact, and a grain of salt, until I really have had a chance to get to know them. Then if a genuine friendship develops along the way I’m sure it will be a durable one.

By the way I like Debbie’s comment about the 3D vs. 2D world. Thanks for the interesting post, Tom.

-- Check out my new website! http://www.theeasellife.com

Like you said, usually the quicker any relationship starts, the quicker it ends.

Normally I’d agree with you. However, Five months after I met my wife we were married. We both have committed for a lifetime. We’ve been happy together for over twelve years now. I am blessed. There was no internet component to our relationship though.

-- Maplewood, MN

The internet is a strange place. People can be living an ater ego. They may depict themselves as a person that is nothing like who they really are.

-- Tom, Surfside Beach, SC - Romans 8:28

Interesting commentary, Tom. It’s your willingness to trade in ideas without additional varnish that makes you an asset in the world of “imaginary friends”.

Oh, and TomFran, oddly I liked you better before you went all hunky. Please don’t start in about anti-depressive medication and your teen-aged paramour. It will be better for all of us. ;-D

-- "Bordnerizing" perfectly good lumber for over a decade.

Tom: I always wondered about you.

-- Karson Southern Delaware karson_morrison@bigfoot.com

I know very little on the present subject albeit I study it every day of my life.
I do know that before you can have any relationship with other individuals you must learn to love yourself.
With that comes forgiveness. When you have mastered forgiveness you can expand on that to encompass your “friends”.
Most of us try to meet other people with the prospect of expanding the relationship.
I have long since decided to over look the short comings of my friends rather than risk the alternative.
Meeting people on the internet has been difficult for me as I am a very private person so there is little likelyhood that a relationship formed electronically will propell us both to the next level.

Bob

-- A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner

Uh, so does that mean you want that router back right away?

-- You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. (Plato)

For me LJ is the neighborhood we all grew up in, or wished we did. I hardly know my neighbors, might not be able to pick them out of a police line up… but we live in a small town and most of us work in the nearest city.

Some of my fellow jocks are as real to me as my real friends – many of which I don’t talk with on the phone anymore either. A few e-mails, online scrabble games and standing “dates” in the real world sum up our relationships.

-- I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso -- http://snbcreative.wordpress.com/

Karson, I’m really Tom Cruise ;^D

Actually, I’ve just had cosmetic surgery, so that I could be as Doug put it “all hunky.” I figured that I may as well just do it, and become the person that I’ve been impersonating online.

-- Tom, Surfside Beach, SC - Romans 8:28

”Uh, so does that mean you want that router back right away?”

Never lend a tool to a freind that you cant give away to them.
I guess another 3-4 months isn’t that bad. <g>

-- A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner

alter egos … I think it happens in the 3d world as well as online… people pretend all the time.

And as for the quality of online friendships, after my husband died I drove down to Massachusetts to meet an internet with whom I had chatted for several years and who had “held my hand” during the highs and lows during those times.
When we met, (I went to her office building), it was like she and I had been best friends for years and I’d been to her house a thousand times. We are still good friends to this day.

As to etiquette etc, I’m not sure what have been the driving forces: I know that we are definitely not a society that likes to be bound by “rules”. For the most part I think “we” are trying to live an unstructured life, perhaps a modern version of the freedom of the 60’s.

-- "Functional WoodArt" by Debbie, Canada (http://www.execulink.com/~yohan)

and that mirror keeps reflecting the negatives as well .. darned thing, and it gets all distorted and we think that the OTHER person has all the flaws and we are perfect (until we realize that we are behaving in the same way).

-- "Functional WoodArt" by Debbie, Canada (http://www.execulink.com/~yohan)

I’m sure there are many personal reasons for it, but I find it a little disconcerting when I can’t place a face with a person I’m developing a relationship with over the internet. It certainly helps the relationship and adds a bit more “real world” personalness to it when there is a real persons face I can connect to their comments. At least for me.

Take Mot for instance. From what I know of him he seems like a nice enough guy but at this point he also has a huge head and tiny body ;-). And Dan Walters! I just know he does that icon thing to give me a headache everytime I see him online ;-) So, from a visual standpoint, Mot has a big head and Dan likes to give people headaches. And then there’s Wayne. Great comments on the site but I always want to pick up a stick and throw it for him. Ok, ok, I could go on and on but I’m just teasin everyone.

It use to be “ships passing in the night”. Now it’s “pixels passing on the screen”.

-- Better to say nothing and be thought the fool... then to speak and erase all doubt.

I like what EGA said, it’s something that will be known by both of you and will never have to be mentioned..
I’m pretty new here and it’s the first and only “forum” I’ve ever joined… Life throws us all major curves sometimes. When ya swing and miss. It’s the folks and family who are there when you raise tour head from a win or loss..
the one’s who tell you the truth and drop insecurities at the door… That’s very easy to do here on this machine. Faster than I expected I have valued and praise opinions and lessons here ‘including yours’. We all enter here with the common Love and Dreams of a craft art way of life that is truly a world of it’s own. I do think of a lot of folks here as friends already. Sure not BEST FRIENDS but some of you I’ve written to I know that if we met face to face we wouldn’t stop talking about wood or wood working… Happy New Year TOM..
Your newest friend , Patrick woodnut99

-- PJM.`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸ ><((((º> why's there a light in fridge and not the freezer? , aka, the wood hunter.aka tigermaple5

Yeah, it’s nice to have a picture and a real name… a real name gives us some context. It’s easy to gravitate toward or away from a clever handle… but as sites grow, our names may be taken, it can be harder to find a good handle to use… at least we aren’t stuck with only our nicknames here.
So much easier to tell your wife, “Mark said…” rather than, “woodwrangeler457, you know, the guy who made the cherry table, and liked my pens,...
Names are so much less cumbersome. Photos are nice, but not as essential. Sure they’re are a few dogs in here, but we get to know them through their writing, and can get to know them on a deeper level than judging by a photo alone.
If I never meet anyone here, I do feel like I know some of you very well. Better than my neighbors, really.

-- I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso -- http://snbcreative.wordpress.com/

Tom (mot),

You ever get that desk cleaned?

-- Ethan, http://www.merganserwoodworks.com, http://greystonegreen.blogspot.com/

A few comments and thoughts:
I love the 2d and 3d analogy.
Imaginary friends, that is just to funny to ever forget.
I’ve always pondered the concepts of acquaintances versus friends. I have many acquaintances and very few friend.
I am NOT a private person ask any of the people that know me in the real world.

Having a face to remember a person by is backed by hard science. There is a special part of the bran that fires off when we see a face. The funny thing is if the face is upside down that special part of the brain does not fire. It can be seen with (I can’t remember the exact scans) I think EKG or EEg or one of the 3d electro imaging systems.

Imaginary friend can be much better than 3d friends since they can be all you want them to be, we get to fill in the blanks and make them whatever we need them to be. The more you get to know a 2d friend the more 3d they become and the less like clay they can be for you. This can be good or bad depending on your need and what you think you want :)

For me, you are all the best and smartest people I ever know (until you prove yourself otherwise :) since my 3d world has many butt heads in it I would rather keep this one perfect, or at least as perfect as I can for as long as I can <laugh>

-- "so much to learn and so little time"..

I hear you, snowdog. Knuckleheads are easily dealt with by clicking ones mouse. In the 3D world, you have to suffer the odd fool, just to get through the day. Some of my best friends are my imaginary friends. It’s been an interesting discussion, and no, Red…haven’t cleaned the desk yet. Happy New Year to everyone.

-- You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. (Plato)