13 November, 1998

Social Skills

First of all, this is very scary. I finally got around to watching Buffy and Felicity on tape last night. As Gabby so nicely put up the quote I can just point you there. The long and short of it is that one of the characters actually mentions his home page on the show.

I idly wondered if the domain existed. Had the producers of the show actually bothered to buy the domain name? Maybe some wisecracking webfolk might have nabbed it after seeing the reference on the show and put up something highly amusing.

The answer, of course, is that yeah, it exists and by the look of things, the producers nabbed it and put up a web page which could belong to this character. So there it is, a personal homepage of a fictional character, which does sound like a student's homepage. Except that it's a bit sophisticated for most of the college student pages I'm familiar with unless they're CS majors or simply have a lot of time on their hands

The idea that Real People put up fiction on the Web does not scare me at all. But something about this does. The character doesn't exist, except on the TV screen, but the page is obviously intended to act as a real page, as if Noel Crane were a real live person. Ugh... just ... ugh.

At the same time there's something vaguely cool about being able to do that ... as if some particular aspect of the medium has finally been touched on.

But that's neither here nor there.

If you went over to Gabby's site and read the quote, you noted that the reason Mr. Crane has a personal web page is "Too much time, not enough friends". This on a night when I was mulling the fact that my social skills are severely underdeveloped and that my innate ability, simply to talk to people in an engaging manner is entirely lacking.

I just get seem to get the knack for joining a conversation. I either make it mine, or say the wrong thing entirely. Not exactly the best means for building positive relationships.

Can I blame my own lack of current, present and available friends on my lack of social skills? Or is really simply a lack of personality? Sabs would just kiss my cheek and say "Honey, there's nothing wrong with being shy." But of course my own self-doubt has to take this concept and run with it.

Do I have a web page because I have too much time and not enough friends?

Well, I certainly don't have too much time, as my relatively scarce diary entries of late have shown. I am busy, overly busy, very busy, terribly busy.

Not enough friends?

Well ... that depends on what "enough" is ... having one really good friend who is always there for you, that you spend a lot of quality time with, can be plenty.

My real problem is that I don't have enough CLOSE friends in my immediate area. I have lots of casual friends around, but I hunger for that closeness which thus far, I've shared with only a handful of people in my life: 4 women and 2 guys.

That kind of closeness is something which can only be built over time. All the people which I've had that time to do that with either live far, far away from here and are terrible correspondents, or have gotten lost in this thing called the distance of time.

The only one near me is Sabs.

While he's still a good friend, as well as my partner, something changes when friendship shifts into romance and then Relationship.

Sometimes I just want to hang out with my girlfriends the way I used ot in the good old days ...

And I wonder how my mother deals with this ... dealt with this when we moved away from everything she'd ever known again and again ...