Facebook is killing my ability to socialise. Well, not facebook alone, but texting, IM'ing, the lot.. Although this post may seem slightly out of the blue, I was reading Gem's post on the new Nivea campaign, a million moments of closeness, in which she confronts the idea of the diminishing effect facebook and twitter has had on the moments of closeness with real people, and some of the points she made struck home. I am completely guilty of losing touch with reality in moments, living my life solely through my computer especially during summer, only leaving the house to train or for proper occasions. And in doing this, I make my life so much harder to live when I finally pull my arse back out into the real world. This past maybe week and a half I've been having to sort out my real life friends to the ones I talk to purely online- despite going to the same school or being in the same friends circle, and its been hard to accept that these people who I believe I am extremely close to, really exist to me only in the land of social media. And some of these make for extremely awkward real life encounters....Take for example J*. I met him at a mutual friends birthday party 3 years ago, and although I greeted him warmly enough, didn't have a conversation with him the full night, but the next day, we became facebook friends, and started chatting casually, which resulted in swapping numbers and msns. From this day on, I talked to him just about every day for the next few months, both content that we would never have to actually see each other face to face, relieved almost, if we saw each other, we'd have to confront what we knew was feelings, and thats never good. It wasn't until the next year at the same mutual friends birthday dinner, that I actually saw him again face to face. We didn't talk. We caught eyes, it would be awkward, we'd smile, look away. We were both nervous and we sat at opposite ends of the table and didn't say a word, mature eh? Of course, that night, we text talking about how we didn't talk? Acting as though it was just an inconvencience of timing at the table, not the awkward reality that although we were thick as thieves over BBM, we had nothing to say to each other's faces. Yet still, we talked for another year, most days, although we went through phases. Roll on the 3rd encounter, about 6 months after, at another mutual friends birthday party. And believe it or not, we talked. We talked a lot, like the way we texted. However we were both drunk, we weren't sober or truly aware, but we were as close as we were every night at midnight when we sat in bed with our phones glued to our hands. I thought it was a turning point, but no, I saw him again 2 months later at group trip to the beach, where we didn't talk once. Sad, disappointing, and yet, I have no one to blame but myself, and him. And facebook. You may wonder what the point of this whole story was? Well here it is, Facebook gave me a relationship with this boy, it brought my close to him, gave me someone to lean on and trust, a friend when no one else was there, and yet, it wasn't real, and whilst we were extremely close through our phones, when we were physically close, we couldn't even talk. If I hadn't had this 'thing' with him over facebook, then at those parties, I would have had no problem talking to him one to one, and so I would have met the boy that is so truly kind and considerate, but for real this time. Not via IM. So facebook was a kick in the teeth there...
In other news, I've been a bit MIA from blogging in the past week. I've been trying to pull myself out of this slight depression I've been in since summer began, and it seems to work during the day, it's just the nights that are bad at the moment, I'll just sit on my bed and stare at the wall for what feels like days, it's like I'm in a trance. But I don't want to talk or see or be near anyone.. It is getting better though, I know that much. Tomorrow I'll be putting on a pretty picture heavy post to show why I've been MIA these past few days, but for now, I'll leave you with these, boredum on the train home from a birthday dinner, drunken and exhausted, we took a few rather ugly looking pictures.. but still, it was fun! Excuse the lack of makeup (trying to fix my skin in time for going back to school) and unfixed hair (harry potter was on when I was getting ready, harry potter trumps looking good)...
