catching up with friends

Catherine and I, for instance, knew each other fairly well in a work context before we ever really talked about weblogging. It was at her encouragement (as well as Phil's) that I finally did something with the domain I'd been hanging onto for a while and started up a weblog.

It's not as though we weren't friends before -- we were among the relatively few women going through training at the same time, and we were officemates, and we helped each other through various technical and work-related snafus -- but I do think the weblog has added a new facet to our friendship. It's this semi-secret bond we share; both of our weblogs are meant to be fairly public, but neither of us (as far as I know) really makes a special effort to advertise or publicize to our coworkers.

And Philboo, aka my web guru, and I have never met face-to-face, though we've known each other for... what, three years now? A long time, at any rate. I'm proud to count him among my close friends, despite our lack of geographical proximity. We talk to each other almost daily, and I miss him when he isn't around. He's a good guy, encouraging and eminently helpful. And even though I've never met him in real life, I feel as though I know a lot about him. You can glean a lot from what a person writes over a long period of time.

I was telling Lloyd the other night about an experience I had meeting a local diarist on Friday. I had a lovely time, and hopefully, she did too. We went out for coffee in south Austin and got to know each other a bit, even though we've been in a little mutual admiration loop for quite a while.

It's a fascinating juxtaposition of relationships, meeting people with whom you've had a voyeuristic, written sort of bond -- that's the phenomenon I was trying to convey to Lloyd. In a sense, I wasn't meeting a stranger -- I knew quite a bit about her, and she, likewise, knew a great deal about me -- but the most important issues really needed a face-to-face meeting to be resolved. Is she someone I'd enjoy being friends with? I thought she would be; we have some interests in common, and we're close in age. But after 3.5 hours of hanging out and chatting, it's a much easier question to answer. For me, anyway. :)

Ultimately, to me, the interactive dynamic of weblogs and online communication seems to provide an outlet for expression of ideas and feelings that might not come up in a casual face-to-face conversation. Among casual friends, there's a sense of what's proper to talk about, and until a friendship has weathered whatever storm helps evolve it into a closer bond, there's no impetus to cross that conversational line. In a weblog or a journal, I have the freedom to express myself as I see fit (or not), and the opportunity is there for my readers to respond, opening a channel of communication with people I might never have had the opportunity to know in the first place.