The other night I was really down. It’s been months since I’ve heard much from a small group of friends I thought I was really close to. I don’t have very many friends. I do have other friends, but this group felt like sis­ters when we were together. We planned hav­ing out­ings with our kids, that sort of thing. We would get together once a month to hang out and play games.

Now, I’m not sure.

I talk to one a lit­tle here and there, and I recently went to see her for a scentsy party. I had a nice time, but I feel like we only get together for these types of par­ties. I did go to her house­warm­ing, but was late and only stayed a lit­tle while because of work­ing. Work sched­ules are a big fac­tor in plan­ning any sort of get together.

I talk to another about once a month when I visit her at her work. The third I haven’t talked to in months, and don’t even know where she’s liv­ing at the moment. I know she and her hus­band bought a house, but not where. I have asked, more than once, and just never receive a reply. I don’t know why this both­ers me so much. I guess I thought you told friends where you were living?

My hus­band came up to com­fort me dur­ing my break down. He reminded me that not only do I have other friends, that we were also not the type of peo­ple to call any­one, and that everyone’s been busy lately with us all three buy­ing houses this past September and October.

During the con­ver­sa­tion I brought up the fact that I have more friends around the world, that I only talk with online, than I do offline. Even those friends, I really only talk to online. That’s part of what’s so hard about social­iz­ing with this group of friends, they’re not nearly as big into online things as I am. So, if they’re not online, I hear noth­ing from them. I don’t talk to any­one on the phone but my mom. Everything else is pretty much through face­book, twit­ter or email. I don’t even text that much. I try to plan times to hang out, but either I get no reply, or sched­ules just don’t seem to match up.

I miss hav­ing friends I could hang out with and play games. It’s not the same when it’s only two peo­ple play­ing a game, and mostly we don’t play games just us, we watch TV together (right now we’re on fire­fly) in the rare times we’re both home at night.

Then my hus­band said some­thing else that caused me to have one of those light bulb moments. You can have friends who your only thing in com­mon with them is loca­tion: you live in the same city, went to the same schools, etc. Or, you can have friends who your only thing not in com­mon with them is loca­tion. It’s okay to have friends who you’ve never met face to face.

He said that if this group of friends is really my friend, than when things set­tle down, they’ll call or we’ll work out a day that works to hang out. In the interim, I do have other friends, and not to dis­count them because we haven’t been super close in recent years. I could con­tact some of them to hang out some time, if that’s what I really wanted to do.

But really, when do we ever go out any­where? We both work 45–50 hours a week. Then we get home and have to put the house together, and keep it run­ning. Mostly, he builds and fixes things around the house, while I do the day-to-day func­tion­ing type things to keep it going: like dishes, laun­dry and gro­ceries, etc.

Our house is 161 years old, it’s like hav­ing another fam­ily mem­ber to take care of. I love my house. It’s just a lot of work.

Question to the read­ers: What are your thoughts on friend­ships either offline or online?

I’ve been doing a lot of think­ing lately. Mostly about what it is that makes us who we are. As much as I know that who we are is made up by the inside parts of our­selves, our expe­ri­ences and so forth. I can’t help but think that my things start to rep­re­sent me, too. For instance, I’ve said before that I would feel like part­ing with a piece of myself if I were to give away any of my books. I felt devis­tated about the loss of my files. My writ­ing, mainly, is what set this off. I poured my heart into those works, they felt like a sig­nif­i­cant part of me.

But, like I told my hus­band. They’re files. They’re not even real things.

I still feel lost with­out them. Very much like a piece of me is missing.

I’d still be me with­out my books. I’d still be me with­out my old (and hon­estly not very good, although not bad for a 14 year old) writ­ing. Or, my kit­ten pic­tures of Max. My files are not me. My things are not me.

So then why do they feel so much like they are? Why do we have a need to per­son­al­ize every­thing? Things come in col­ors, can be embroi­dered, can have dif­fer­ent designs and styles. If our things don’t make us, why do we have to impose so much of our­selves, onto our things?

When I describe myself, the first two things I think of with­out fail is that I am a writer, and a reader. Secondly I list myself as a wife, and a cat-mom. I’m more than what I do, who I’m mar­ried to, and who I take care of.

But, what?

I think, at least in my case, our things become a shield. Our hob­bies become an easy way to con­nect with peo­ple with­out hav­ing to really con­nect or con­verse. If I say I love to read, and some­one I meet does too, that’s one thing we can talk about. That’s some­thing to start a friend­ship on.

If I said I was an extreme intro­vert who found talk­ing to peo­ple incred­i­bly intim­i­dat­ing and non-desirable, well, then that con­ver­sa­tion wouldn’t go quite as well.

Question to the read­ers: So, how do you define yourself?

An update on my other post about los­ing my hard drive and my lap­top. I got the call from best buy today, and they want $1350-$1500 to fix the exter­nal drive.

So I will obvi­ously be not get­ting the exter­nal drive fixed.

It’s really upset­ting because that was quite lit­er­ally every­thing dig­i­tal I had saved over the last 14 years or so. Every. Last. Thing.

And now it’s gone.

However, I have my wed­ding pho­tos on CD. And I have my WIP novel. I’d be a lit­tle more dev­as­tated if I lost those two things. The writ­ing hurts, but to be hon­est most of it was crap from when I was a teenager. Going for­ward with my writ­ing, I’ll just have to write all new stuff instead of revis­ing all the old stuff like I planned. It’s not so bad.

I’m sad about los­ing our pic­tures. But as my hus­band said, we never looked at them any­way, and there were so many that it was hard to do so if we wanted to. We have a few printed out, and he has some on his com­puter. I’ll miss them, but we still have the mem­o­ries. And I have some copies of a few on face­book, even if they’re poor quality.

The rest, the old web­site ver­sions and back­ups, old sims saves, and I don’t even know all of it, I’m not too upset over. I had too much junk on there any­way that I needed to sort. The music isn’t lost, I just have to re-burn all the CDs, or not. I have the stuff I lis­ten to now on this com­puter so I may not bother.

I feel like I should have learned some­thing from all this. Obviously I need to back up my back­ups, because when the main com­puter dies, then the backup dies before I can re-install every­thing, I lose all of it. I don’t want to lose it all a sec­ond time. Except, I’d lose much less.

But what else? That I held on to too much old junk? I do that in my offline life too.

Question to the read­ers: Is there a sil­ver lin­ing to all this?