What Kind of Friend am I?

Some time ago there was a woman on myLot who though not a native English speaker did her best to keep up with the discussions.  She asked to join my friends list and I was pleased to have her.  Over the following weeks she managed to upset a fair few people and repeatedly changed her avatar.  When this occurred she always told me her new name and rejoined the List.  I also gave her my private e mail address which she regularly used to contact me off myLot.  We corresponded every couple of days this way.  She has now decided that I don't  E Mail her sufficiently often to be regarded as worth continuing to correspond with.  That's a shame but I shall not be popping in to the library to look up the section entitled "101 ways to kill yourself".  

The question that I ask myself though is "What kind of friend am I if I don't maintain a regular contact."  I don't think that true friendship does require regular contact.  The man that was my Best Man I saw for the first time in five years last July on his 50th birthday - I always knew he was older than me but it took 25 years to find that out for certain!  We chatted as normal, admired each other's paunches and greying hair, and were, well, friends.  I am concerned that the lady ex-friend now I suppose, thought that she needed almost daily contact to maintain the friendship.  I suspect that her life has been a catalogue of disappointments in her relationships with other people and that she will move on to another and then another e mail correspondent.  None of whom will ever satisfy her need for companionship.

Love 

Funny thing Love.  I am very fortunate that I have been loved well all my life.  As a child you don't notice it.  Hopefully it is there coming from your family, your Mum and Dad, siblings, whoever, but it is only as an adult that you really start to think about what love is.

I am a great lover.  I don't mean between the sheets; love in terms of my affection for others, male or female.  People talk about soul mates.  Is that the same as being on the same wavelength as someone?  I have known many people that I have readily identified with, that have spoken my language and shared similar thought processes.  But I have not loved them. Love to me is a feeling, an emotion, not always action.  Wordnet defines love as "a strong positive emotion of regard and affection". But this is a description not an explanation of the feeling that one has when in love with a person, a concept, an act or even something as a food.  I love my wife and daughter unconditionally.  They mean so much to me that I would die if I thought that would make their lives safer, stronger and happier.  When they are around me I experience a happiness and delight that I cannot describe adequately.  But why?  What is it about these two people that cause me to feel differently than I do about anybody else.  How has it been sustained for over twenty years.   Obviously I know them better.  Maybe it's the reciprocation of my feelings, my joy at being in their company returned to me.  My wife has always been there for me from the first time we realised that our feelings weren't simply a liking for each other.  I have done my best to look after her too.  My daughter is literally of my loins.  A piece of me.  She thinks like me, acts like me (except that she is one hundred times more energetic), is me in so many ways.  I cannot imagine life without her now.

What of the others.  Let's talk intangibles.  People that ought, by any reasonable definition be people that I might like, but not be too bothered about.  They are not people that I have ever met, most don't even live in the UK.  I know nothing about them except what I have seen coming at me through the computer screen.

Let's look at my friend Nova.  I met Nova though myLot three months ago.  She seemed bubbly, intelligent and committed to her principles.  She made me laugh and challenged many of my preconceptions of life.  We also shared similar interests.  She knew some of my history too.  But my liking for her turned to love in a surprising way.  I found myself in an unpleasant discussion with someone who clearly had no regard for me, and refused to accept my apology when I thought that I might have jumped to a wrong conclusion.  Nova leapt to my defence.  I didn't ask her to, she did of her own volition.  Here was someone that I had never even spoken to, let alone met outside of the discussion forum, fighting for me!  I was simply astonished that she would do that.  From that moment on I wanted to know more about this wonderful person who had been moved, by I don't know what, to the point that she was prepared to kick ass as they say in America.  I have now seen her on my webcam.  She is everything I have described and more.  I am so lucky to have a friend like Nova.

Or Sparky who pointed me in the direction of this Blog site.  She has plenty of her own issues to tax her, but she cheerfully drops things to come and talk to me; listens to the rubbish that I spout, puts her arms around me; hugs and kisses me and makes me laugh and do silly things. Katherine, who I love so much that I ache.  We both grew up within 30 miles of each other.  She holds my hand when I am daft.  Kisses me better and gives me sensible sound advice.  I correspond with her each day.  My heart leaps when I see a post from her.  Angel, Cyn, my good friend Goodie who has been so much help this past day or two.  Ruby and Ellie my special British friends who tease me keep me in line and share their unique experiences with me.  Mummymo, who tells me off and puts me to bed when I stay up too late.   Others too, so many.  I have such a deep and warm love and affection for these people, yet I have never even spoken to a single one of them.  In the main I would not know them if I saw them in the street, nor they me.  But I know that I have such strong feelings about them that I cannot imagine my daily life without their cheerful banter.  

"The boy's daft" I hear you cry, and indeed he is.  But these people, through their kindness and companionship to me, their simple caring, despite the fact that we all have very different backgrounds and lifestyles have never judged me, nor taken a negative stance with me.  They tell me that they love me and I love them back.  That's it then.  No explanation, just a warmth and trust that the right thing will be done.  I worry that I may have let them down.  But if I have, I know that they will tell me in a caring and understanding way and will not judge me.

Well here I am

I have a Blog.  I have no real idea of what a Blog is but it seems as good a way as any other to wile away an hour or two.

Firstly, I make no apologies for my Blog Title.  I am not anybody famous, just a face that might pass by in the street and not warrant a second glance.  I have of course pinched it from George and Weedon Grossmith and added a slight adaptation of my own.

So where to begin.  At the beginning I suppose.

I am 50 years old.  English.  Married with one daughter.  I live in the city of Salisbury famous for the Cathedral and a plain but not much else.  That said it is  a very old and historic city, but I am sure that there is someone out there that has described the City's history far more eloquently that I ever could.

What else is there?

Currently I do not work having resigned from my previous employer after 31 years, the last few of which were exceptionally difficult for me and resulted in me having a nervous breakdown.  I shall refer to myself as being "potty' or a "crackpot" from time to time.  This is not meant to trivialise what is a very serious issue in modern western society, but it is how I think of myself.  I suffer fairly low self esteem as a result of my illness but I am working on that.  Like many males I love to have my ego massaged , I only have to do the family washing once and I shall crow about it for the rest of the week!

I have come here to draw breath from a social networking site called myLot.  I have been a member of that site for three months and have loved every minute of it.  I have met some of the loveliest people there.  People that don't judge me (although right now there are some exceptions.  But I will come to that), have given me love and affection that I surely do not deserve and have given me hope for the future.  I shall talk about some of them in my ramblings here.  I also have a surrogate daughter on myLot who I love like my own.  Her "real" mother and sisters are members too and I regard them as confidantes and arbiters of my actions.  If Nanna says "no" then I listen.  It is not fair to single people out.  But I will no doubt. 

Over the past week or so, and a week is a long time in myLot World, I have witnessed a general decline in overall happiness of the people there that I mix with.  myLot has a ratings system that I don't understand and have never been too bothered by.  My own rating has been almost constant since soon after arriving.  But others are very bothered that their own ratings have gone down for inexplicable reasons.  There have been many views circulated about what the reasons for these changes may be.  Gremlins, Trolls all sorts of fairy folk rushing around negatively rating peoples discussions for the sake of it.  I have always taken a fairly jaundiced view of this and subscribed to the maxim "He who lives by the sword dies by the sword". But this has certainly not been the case with several of my friends whose discussions are innocuous, and who do not court controversy at all.  I have a particular friend, who I correspond with daily, she lives in Arizona which is almost as far from Salisbury as it is possible to be, I shall call her Katherine, because that is her name, who said in a post that asked if people were disliked at work, that she had a co-worker who disliked her intensely.  The response to this from a "new" myLotter was an outpouring of hate and poison the like of which I have not seen since I was in the school playground.  The attack moved to another discussion where even the educational prowess of her son was questioned.  Katherine is someone that I love dearly and who, so far as I am aware, does not have a bad bone in her body.  I am not blind to people's frailties, but badness is not one of hers.  So why the attack.  The explanation given was that the attacker was the daughter of a co-worker.  Which didn't seem likely, but you never know. Rather than wade in and fight beside her, which I was tempted to do, I reported the conversation to myLot HQ and devised my own discussion.  This I likened to a walk around a garden.  I explained that I had found Katherine wounded and I asked my fellow posters to show some restraint in their postings.  I fully expect and even hope that discussions should be a heathy cross flow of opinion, but making personal attacks is not a grown up or mature act.  I was and am so very cross about this that I decided to leave myLot for a while.  Compounding this were several suggestions in responses to my discussion that I should let things lie where they are and not get involved.  There are some occasions when it is acceptable to leave things be.  But to me - witnessing an unwarranted attack on somebody that had done nothing to attract such attention - standing by and doing nothing is tantamount to joining in the attack itself.  So I have withdrawn from myLot to think things through.  There are some there now that are saying that I have been chased off, or run away; that I have surrendered "power" to those that would cause trouble.  I don't believe that I have done any such thing.  I hurt for my friend.  Not for me.  This is my protest.  At least I have managed to get people writing and thinking about these things.  I shall return to myLot in due course I expect.  Refreshed and ready once more to have fun with my friends old and new.

I am ready for a coffee now.  I shall return later.