People You Wish You Knew

I'm always amazed at the way the definition of "meeting someone" has changed in the last 10 or 12 years. I'm more amazed at how much easier it is to meet people now than it used to be. Before about 1996 or 97 "meeting someone new" -- for whatever purpose -- meant actually encountering said person in the three-dimensional world. Some of those were random chance, some were facilitated by friends or family, some came by way of classified ads looking for one thing or another, but they all involved two or more meatware packages interfacing in the meat-o-sphere. Fast forward to 2008 and it is now possible -- even likely -- that at least one person you call a friend is someone who has never breathed from the same 100 cubic meters of air you have.

My first experience of this kind came in 1997 or 98 when I chanced upon a woman named "Cat" in an AOL chat room. She lived in Las Vegas, I lived in Raleigh and the closest we ever came to meeting in the "conventional" sense was a few late-night telephone calls. We corresponded, we chatted, we sent each other virtual birthday greetings. We exchanged photos, ideas, stories. When one of us hurt, the other was there to lean on. When something good happened we shared the excitement. We were, in any way that mattered, friends. Even though as far as I know, we were never less than 2000 miles apart on the ground.

But one thing that the information age hasn't changed is the continental drift that takes place between friends. While it's easier to make contact in the cybersphere, it's also easier to lose that contact. After probably four years, Cat changed ISP's and email addresses. Maybe I didn't get the memo, maybe it got caught by my spam filter, or maybe she'd reached one of those points where it was necessary to simply cut loose all the things that "had been". Maybe she went into Witness Protection, who knows? I just know I miss my friend, and I wish I'd been able to meet her in the real world.

These days there's my friend JC. We really have no excuse, because according to my calculations, there are fewer than 25 miles between us. But the one time we actually set up a real-world F2F, a friend's kid had to go for an emergency appendectomy only a couple of hours before the appointed time. The friend was understandably a basket case and needed a steadying hand. So JC made the only choice she could -- the basket case friend was way higher on the priority list than the random internet guy. She was exactly where she should have been. But I wonder sometimes if the cataclysmic way that meeting was derailed has made us gun shy about trying again. Who knows what might result? We could spark a plague of locusts, or frogs, or creepy clowns. It's a heady responsibility having the fate of the world (or at least southwestern Wake County) in your hands. But please... if something biblical happens around here, don't immediately assume it's us.

And there's an outgrowth from these points of virtual intersection. One degree of separation from JC is her oldest brother whom I was never fortunate enough to meet even in the virtual world before his passing. On those occasions when she talks about him, the love and admiration in her virtual voice is almost palpable. I think -- no, I know-- I would have liked him. Because JC is one of the best people I know, and I'm pretty sure he had a lot to do with that. Anybody that could inspire that much goodness in someone else is someone I feel poorer for not having known.

Somebody somewhere came up with the idea of listing the five people you'd invite for dinner when you get to heaven. The idea of choosing your Celestial Fave-5 is flawed to begin with, since the limitations that apply in this life presumably aren't part of your contract with Afterlife Wireless. And it would be easy to fire off five famous people and be done with it. But I've met famous people -- some of them legendary in their fields. Famous people have books -- or at the very least news articles -- written about them. I can find out all about them before I die. So if a six-top is all Chez Universe has available when I make my reservation, I want to sit down with those people I wish I'd met.

I'm sure Gandhi will be doing a "thing" somewhere later, I'll check him out then.

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Stranger Than Fiction
Search engines are strange creatures. I can look at my Sitemeter reports and tell who the "regulars" are (though I'm still getting used to having "regulars" -- thanks guys!). But one of my favorite reports is the "By Location" view. Mainly my viewers are based in the US, leading me to wonder if I know anyone in Seattle or Miami or San Diego. And my participation in the recent Thematic Photographic presentation has netted be some visitors from Canada. The "who" of these isn't always obvious, but the "how" usually is. But every now and then a different flag pops up. Turkey, The UK, even one from Sri Lanka(!), and most recently Belgium. Some of them arrive from Cool Blogs By Other People. But a few get here via search engines, and some of the search terms make you wonder.

One wayfaring stranger landed here while searching for a guy named Chuck Poe. Was he looking for the Chuck Poe I mentioned in my "terrorist scare" post? Or was this some other Chuck Poe who's actually the alter ego of some superhero Marvel comics hasn't discovered yet? My last photo post included shots from Rochester, NY and made a brief mention of the Eastman Kodak building (which wasn't even in any of the photos I used). That was apparently enough to bring somebody here from the NASDAQ listing for Kodak. Someone searching for author Fareed Zakaria stopped by because I mentioned that I was reading his book.

Those don't puzzle me. I can draw a logical line from A to B to C and get from there to here. But then there are these examples:
My Turkish guest was searching for "wordporn" (something I picked up from Tiff. Thanks babe!). Which had me wondering if that means the same thing in Turkey that it does in the US or if they know something we don't know. Most recently, my guest from Antwerp found me by Googling the words "dresscode blow" (I swear!). Once again I'm left to wonder, "Did he/she have the same thing in mind that I did when I wrote it?" Or does that mean something else entirely in French or Flemish (not sure what they speak in that part of Belgium)?

I see these searches and try to get a picture in my mind of the people at the other end. Are they as confused by the language barrier as I am? Do they wind up here scratching their heads and thinking "Quoi de fuq??" And how do you say "WTF" in Sinhala or Tamil anyway? Do they get my jokes? Or are covert operatives for Homeland Security keeping a watch on me and using some unsuspecting ISP in South Asia as a decoy? These are the musings that a fevered, precaffeinated, idle brain can come up with on a Saturday morning.

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