themidlifegals

Our neighborhood now consists mostly of strangers on the Internet.  We don’t even know the people who live next door to us.  What does that say?  Does it mean that no one in our real neighborhood wants to be our friends?  Hell no…well, maybe…but we do know the folks across the street, and by saying, we know them…I mean, we watch them.  We watch their kiddos playing in the front yard, we watch the husband and wife have arguments, and their dog comes across the street for regular visits with our cats through our screen door.  The cats act like we do when some solicitor comes knocking…curious, but with a closer look, they hiss and spit!

I have put The Midlife Gals on so many social networking sites, cyber villages and pay-for-posting hubs that I can’t keep everyone straight anymore.  We get the sweetest comments from people who want to be our cyber friends, and I always answer them back, all the while wondering if they know their next-door neighbors like we don’t.  We’ve also had some pretty nasty comments from cyber people who obviously don’t want to be our friends, and the cool thing about technology is that all you have to do is DELETE them from your lives.  You can even BLOCK them forever, which saves me a lot of angst wondering why they dislike us so.  I might get upset if I couldn’t press the delete key, but instead, poof!….they’re gone.

With the whole ‘match.not.com’ thingy, it’s really easy to get rid of a potential suitor who gives you a cyber wink…which kinda disturbs me in the first place.  All you have to do is…nothing…don’t reply and after a few days, he gets the message and moves on.  Or they will even give you text to use in reply to someone who is so shockingly unattractive, you would run away if you ever saw them in real life.  The website sends them a very cordial message, whichever one you choose, like, “I am not accepting suitors at this time,”etc…Here’s an automatic response I’d like for them to use for me sometimes…”No way in HELL do we have a friggin thing in common, and you NEED TO SHAVE!!”

Cyberspace is our neighborhood now, and frankly, we need as many ‘friends’ as we can get.  We’re all about the numbers, as you have to be on the Internet, so in the inimitable words of the late Mr. Rogers (who would REALLY be hard pressed to have any real-life friends)…”Would you be mine?  Could you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?  Won’t you PLEASE?  PLEASE, won’t you be my neighbor?”

KK
**********************************************************
Most of the neighbors I have in cyberspace are actors, film makers or People who are holding $500,000 to one million for me in a bank in Nigeria.  Those are the ones who start their letters with, ‘Dearest One’ and then go into a sob story about someone who died and left me a shitload of money or about some complete stranger who died and left 24 million dollars in a bank in England and they want me to help them get the money into the US and I will get 10%, and they know I can figure that at 2.4mil and I will fall for this scam.  Then they know (after I send them all of my personal information or $240 for mailing & banking costs) that I will never call the police or report them because they know that I knew that the whole thing was fraud, illegal and downright stupid.  And all of these assholes try to make me believe that they are my dearest friend in God whilst they try to take me for everything I’ve got.

I had a boyfriend like that once but I digress.

I think making friends with neighbors might not be such a great idea.  Who was it that said, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’  I say this because I am a Court TV slut.  The People’s Court was my favorite show for 20 years.  A whole bunch of his cases involved neighbors who were friends for decades until they got in a fight about the property line or a dead tree that fell onto the other one’s house or peacocks running rampant around the lawns while one neighbor refused to stop feeding them.  It was always something that ruined the long-term relationship between God-fearing Christian people who then went all out to punish their neighbors until their lives were ruined forever, they moved out, or they ended up in a gun fight at Bubba’s Bunk House Bar.  And then the case goes out of civil and straight to the real courts where curmudgeonly Judge Wapner turns into Christopher Walken in a bad mood.  In short, hatred grows from friendship at times, and you’ve got to nip it in the bud before Judge Judy tells you straight to your face that you are an idiot and shut the fuck up.

My best friends are the ones that I can see and who also email me and know my cell phone number.  They also know what color of hair dye I use and not to call me during ‘Survivor’, ‘Intervention’ or The Academy Awards.  See, I don’t trust people you can’t see over cocktails or a 2% latte.  There are nuances in people’s physical mannerisms that you don’t get when they are showing their best online.  I know Sweet Pea’s attention span is two minutes long, Sandy’s temper is bad when she’s hungry, and Patty writes like Hemmingway online but cusses like an oil field worker.  I don’t really know squat about any of the purely cyber friends I have on TBD or Divine Caroline for instance.  They could be serial killers for all I know.

Cyber-friends are like fake friends.  Are they real or are they facades made of Styrofoam and painted to look like who they always wanted to be?  You’ll never know until you get them drunk or travel with them.  It’s fun to have cyber-friends, okay, but it’s a relationship that never gets deeper than a Burger King ashtray.

Your friend in God,
SalGal

P.S. - Please send the $240 so I can tell UPS to deliver your one million dollars tomorrow.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS