A Slew of Favorites

I had some extra hours these past few days so amused myself by clicking on random entries. I’ve ended up now with a whole slew of favorites. I did that over Thanksgiving vacation and over a few week-ends too, so I have a huge bunch of people I read now. For about 70% of them I don’t leave any notes, I just stalk I guess 😉 I don’t have a lot to say to them or will, from time to time, leave an unsigned note. I just don’t want to add any more OD relationships now I think. I love my circle of favorites but it’s going to get too cumbersome if I end up entangled with too many people and when I get entangled, I REALLY get entangled. I think about people in the middle of the night. I imagine what they’re going through. I pray for them, I analyze their issues and wonder what might help. It’s goofy. I ruminate over folks as if it were practically my own life. It’s nice because it’s like a “real life” friendship. On the other hand, you get too many of those and it’ll wipe you out.

When I first discovered OD in 2000, I did that and I spent immense amounts of time online keeping up with everybody and writing lots of notes, emails, and open entries to people. (Just ask Lace and Jeans if you don’t believe me, she went by another name back then but I made myself crazy with people’s problems at that time and she knew me in those days.) I used to put my family on hold sometimes as I kept up with my favorites. It was nuts

I got a handle on it at one point and firmly forced myself to delete a bunch of people from my favorites list, keeping only about four or five and eventually fading into just a couple until I weaned myself off OD quite a bit and only did an entry once every month or so.

Keeping up with OD is, I think, really good for me as a writer, as a human, and as a therapeutic tool, not to mention as a nice way to have a circle of friends when one has a hectic schedule. It also allows one to have a circle of friends that one might not ordinarily have given the folks one is surrounded with in their daily life. After all, I don’t run into too many men from Switzerland and certainly don’t have occassion to chat with Morman missionaries! I have these kinds of opportunities in OD. I just don’t want OD to take over my life. But people are SO interesting and each person’s life is so interesting that when I click on random entries I so often am curious about what will happen to this person tomorrow. My way of solving that is to make them a favorite for a little while without establishing a relationship then delete them when they don’t update or if they don’t stay terribly interesting. The problem is most people have stayed interesting! 🙂

Anyway, I’ll figure something out. At least life is never boring. People each have some sort of fascinating perspective or experience. I really love to wander through OD-land!