bad date

Since I have a somewhat sizeable on-line presence, I feel it gives me the position to contemplate the "new age" in ways I wouldn't offer to people who sit on the sidelines, making judgments about the rest of us.

With over two years logged in on social networking sites, I had stopped casting doubts about the effects they were having on my life as I was remaining in touch with long distance friends, getting linked up with misplaced friends, and keeping up to date with new ones. For a time, I had this conception that there was something unnatural to being able to "stalk" the pages and pictures of old lost friends or even re-entering their lives and consciousness entirely.

I have found myself (in part) going through reunion after reunion seeing my roster of on-line friends swell like a massive movie trailer for "My Life Passing before My Eyes". One of the first long gone friends to re-enter my life I knew for a few years in high school - we were pretty good friends who got along together and were both positive spirits in one another's existences.

Starting up again was easy and pleasant and there seemed to be a mutual feeling of "why'd we let this fade?" We've since gone past the need to return to chats about high school and really connected via instant messaging and e-mails about the current events in one another's lives as well as a smattering of the lost time. To a point we are closer now than we were fourteen years ago. So, we'd been making some attempts to arrange visits to one another's town for a while now.

Such a chance for an occasion occurred for her and her friend to visit my town this weekend. The wife and I already had a longtime, good friend staying with us, but there was an embracing spirit of "the more the merrier", so we planned to meet up for dinner.

Dinner has since gone down - and oh, how wrong I feel things have gone. I don't even recall what any expectations were at this point, but they were hardly met. In fact, what happened almost felt like a really bad date. I am exceedingly bummed and I'm so lost about what to do about the way I'm feeling.

Now, there was a truly joyous moment when she and I saw one another again for the first time after so many years. The smiles, the embrace, and all of that simultaneously brought me back and bridged the wide gap of these years - like one might feel after long term distance. This is common for people who do stay in touch.

Dinner was a low-key, no frills affair that honestly can be seen as the good first act of the evening. It was the after dinner coffee at our favorite coffeehouse that saw our evening struggling for air. The place was unusually understaffed and conversations seemed to have stuttered to a halt, leaving only a vague suggestion of conversation over an ill-advised game of Trivial Pursuit.

I'm upset and I’m confused about how things turned out. Things felt awkward and out of sorts in a way that I don't feel my friend and my communications had been previously. I wonder whether it was the dynamic of our five-some or any of the variables beyond us two - who maybe should have grabbed some coffee alone for this first reunion. I don't know how but suddenly all of the communication we've had during the last two years disappeared and to a point it seemed no one knew what to say.

It makes me think about the way we represent ourselves in writing. I know this blog occasionally echoes of altered interpretations of self - sometimes a better, more assured, better edited version. I want to think that I was uncomfortable, nervous, and a bit regressive as so many different things were stirred to the surface from my youth. Perhaps she had her own version of this and maybe this evening represents an unavoidable hump that leads to better things.

I am certainly hoping...