I’ve been thinking a lot recently; a luxury some people, sadly, may never know. I was musing most recently about how much the intervention of the internet has changed relationships. I have friends that I have never even met, so how’s that grab ya’? I am not just talking about people who send me funny videos. I am talking about people that I would throw myself in front of a bus for. How the heck can that be possible?

If the internet has had a hand in facilitating serendipity, Facebook has had a hand in doing its bidding. Now I don’t know what your M.O. is, but I am not a friend collector. I find Facebook distracting enough as it is. Notice I blame Facebook for my lack of productivity. Blame shifting is awesome! I should teach a seminar, seriously, but I digress (often).

Facebook has been, for me, instrumental in bringing many lovely people to me; as I’ve mentioned, some of whom I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting in the flesh. All the same, through the exchange of messages and personal energy, I feel quite close to many of these people.

A mutual friend brought me together with Aric, for example. Aric is, like me, a bit of an itchy wanderer, or modern day gypsy, if you will. He flits around in a dizzying pattern provoking wanderlust in others, taking fine ass pictures and amusing the masses (or as he puts it, “tens of people”) on his website. (www.aricwithana.com)
We were supposed to have met, but alas, the stars were not properly aligned. He passed through Istanbul when I was home for Christmas, a fact that I was rather bummed about. But, thankfully, we have continued to converse via Facebook and Gmail, and it has even led to a new collaboration tied to his site, which I hope you will be checking out.

Another arbiter of friendship for me has been my old blog, Secretly Turkish. It was the previous forum of my more melodramatic life; a veritable soap opera that had women all over the world (or so my site statistics showed) hooked on the narcotic-like emotionally overwrought ramblings. I became somewhat of a Harriet Tubman for women in cross-cultural relationships; although mostly women married to or dating or in love with Turkish men. I received very candid, sometimes heart-wrenching, emails and comments from women I didn’t know, begging me for advice or thanking me for my insight. It was occasionally overwhelming, I don’t mind telling you. But in the end, it brought me together with some amazing humans, a fact for which I will always feel grateful, even if Secretly Turkish, and the woman who wrote it, are both no more.

I don’t take broad strokes in the pool that is social networking. I have enough trouble trying to reign in my attention deficit tendencies. Even now, I have work to do and until someone starts paying me to write this, an offer I would seriously consider, it is still just goofing off. So perhaps I ought to exercise a little self-discipline now and stick the proverbial fork in this post?

And……………….stuck!