This past Brunchday (Sunday for the rest of you, but once you start working the 10 - 6 brunch shift, brunch just takes over), I had dinner with Kristen. Visiting the vibrant locales south of Baltimore for work, she found a day off and made the trip up from Jessup, where the government contracting sprawl begins it's long, business park stretch down to the capital, to Baltimore proper, where we have mimosas.
It was a nice visit. We went to one of my favorite local spots and shared a delightful bottle of California zin. We caught up and talked about the fascinating way that virtual reality commerce has monetized itself in to an actual industry - so much so that Blizzard Entertainment built a marketplace feature in to their latest release, Diablo 3. We had some amazing mac n cheese. The Ravens won a very, very sloppy win. (I'm not a football fan but FOURTH AND 29?)
All in all, it was a wonderful way to unwind from the torture of a long, drawn-out and relatively slow brunch shift. It was remarkable only for the fact that even though Kristen and I have known each other for well over five years, this was the first time we'd ever met.
Kristen is the first of my internet friends that I've ever actually met in real life. I'm not bothered by the fact that I have internet-exclusive friends who I've never met. In fact, quite the opposite is true. What if I meet one of them and they turn out to be complete bores, or insufferably annoying? What if they get drunk off of expensive wine, are rude to the waiter and leave me with the bill? What if the internet is the only place they have any personality?
Of course, seeing Kristen was nothing but pleasant, to the point where I would have been happy to order another bottle of wine and continue discussing the blurred lines between virtual reality and actually reality. After all, that is what we were doing; a fact not so much hanging over our heads, but sitting in the back of my mind as an interesting point, a breaking of some sort of virtual fourth wall. Amidst discussing our friends by their internet handles and not by their real names, were we to bring it up, we probably would have just laughed.
Upon recounting the story to a friend of mine, she looked, if not aghast, at least shocked that Kristen and I had never met before. I shrugged it off and carried on, not wanting to interrupt the flow of my current train of thought to explain the length of time I've known Kristen and recite the standard criteria for considering yourself truly friends with someone; discussing exes, having deep conversations, having silly conversations, and all the other things that friends do when they begin to see themselves as such.
Perhaps I am a product of my generation, but it has never really occurred to me that having internet-exclusive friends is a strange thing. Now that Facebook and social media has stripped away much of the danger, allowing us to double-check how "real" our friends are depending on how many pictures they have, the quality of their status updates, etc, I certainly advocate it. After all, we spend an exorbitant amount of time contacting each other electronically anyway.
But I have always been one to blur the lines when it comes to traditional views on relationships. Rigidity never interested me and why it would interest others is beyond me.
And that California zin really was great.
- Kid