Connections

Here it is, Christmas. I'm at home by myself, hanging out, basically doing nothing. I watched a movie earlier, and I've been playing WoW for a couple hours. I didn't think I would feel lonely today, since I don't celebrate Christmas anyway. It's just another day, right? Nonetheless, I do feel a little lonely, and that has made me think a lot about various people in my life.

Most people are a mystery to me. One of my ex-boyfriends used to call it the 99th percentile rule. If I'm in the 99th percentile, that means in my lifetime, I will only connect with 1% of the people on this planet. Everyone else is just a warm body with little or no impact on the course of my life. He even went so far as to narrow it down to the 99.9th percentile -- one tenth of a percent of the earth's population.

Then there's 6 degrees of separation (not to be confused with 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon). Are there really only 6 degrees separating me from someone else I've never met before? In some cases, I think the connection is easy to see. A friend of a friend of a friend... you get the idea. But what about people farther away? What about the militant in Afghanistan, or the starving kid in Africa? Am I connected to them by 6 degrees?

Do you realize how much the internet changes the equation? I've met and talked to people on the internet with whom I would never come into contact in real life. People on myspace, people on instant messenger, people on this very blog. People who read my writing, see my picture, and wonder what kind of person I am.

The internet brings us all together, but sometimes it causes us to be more isolated from the people who are geographically near us. If I'm online all the time, how do I have time to make friends in real life? Are my internet friends the same as real life friends? How do I know?

I don't have many friends in real life. Many, many acquaintances, but very few close friends. It's always been that way. I'm hard to get to know and I don't trust people, so only a few become my true friends, and even those tend to come and go as my life changes.

I'm lazy about maintaining contact with people, especially if I'm under any kind of stress. I hide from people when I'm stressed out. Hiding is always easier than reaching out. When I need to reach out, reaching out to complete strangers on the internet is always easier than reaching out to the people I actually know who care about me. Why is that?

Anyway, I don't really have a point here, I'm just thinking out loud. Human relations are very interesting to me. Sometimes I just don't get it. How does this all work?

This must be why I was never one of the popular kids at school. I spent all my time hanging out with my 1%, thinking about shit like this instead of congregating with the masses and trying to be likable. All these years later, nothing has changed.

Once a geek, always a geek.