Fall is almost here / make-believe friends

The days are shorter, the air is cooler, and the students are returning to Boston. Tomorrow is Moving Day - September 1, the day that U-Haul vans and Ryder trucks clog the Boston streets to a standstill. It's worse than the everyday traffic jams caused by the usual double-parkers and UPS trucks... Fortunately, I don't have to drive in the city tomorrow. I don't even have to take the bus if I don't want to - I can walk to any one of three Orange Line stops. It'll be Farmer's Market Day in Copley Square, so that may well be my destination after work tomorrow.

Fall always makes me want to start new things (or resume old activities). I want to write daily entries in my blog as a way to stimulate me to write every day. Maybe I don't have all that much to say, but that puts me in good company with the vast majority of the other members of the blogosphere. Despair.com has a wonderful Demotivator about blogging: "Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few."

I've been thinking about my online audience. Who are they? Do I even have one? I link to this blog from my Facebook account, so there's an off chance that somebody occasionally reads it. Since nobody leaves a note, I can't tell. But if, in fact, my Facebook friends do show up here, at least they're people who have met me face to face.

I used to post on Open Diary. I still have a diary there, although I haven't actually posted since about January. I have a list of "friends" there, too, just as I do on Facebook. The difference is that I have never met most of those OD friends face to face. In many cases, I don't even know their real names. And that's fine - that's the way that particular forum is run. My own need - what I was and am searching for online - is a group of real-life friends. Everybody I met on Open Diary was content to remain a cyberfriend only, and I decided that there was more potential on Facebook.

I don't need any more make-believe friends. That's at the root of my problem with religion and churches, too. I like to know that there's somebody real out there, somebody who might actually want to spend face-to-face time with me.