This is an opinion piece I wrote for last week’s newspaper. I thought it was ironic that I chose the piece for me to write while I was in Charlotte with Penni and Tara and made me think about a lot of stuff. I thought it was interesting too because I’ve been debating on the whole “friend” thing lately and what it really means. I just hope it doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass like it always does.

When I was younger, I remember buying copies of the teen magazines like Bop or Tiger Beat and they had a list of people with similar interest. I didn’t really write anybody or try to find a pen pal but with the invention of the internet, I can’t deny that it’s helped unite me with people who I would have never met otherwise.

For example, I’m sitting in Charlotte, North Carolina as I write this with my friend Penni, who is a VSU graduate from Georgia, and Tara, an account executive from Arkansas. I met Penni about four years ago on the official Rascal Flatts’ Fan Club message board. We met up at a Savannah concert shortly after and she later transferred to VSU and graduated. I met Tara when I became a NASCAR fan a few years ago and this past week was the first time that we had met in person.

Tara and Penni aren’t the first online ‘pen pals’ that I’ve met in person.

When I first got online, I was a little skeptical about meeting people on there. I was shy on there at first and kind of made up an online persona. Later after I became comfortable, I became myself and that’s when I let myself become friends with people from other parts of the country and across the world.

The first friends I met online were in the Backstreet Boys fandom. There was Rachel from Florida, Marissa from New York, and Emily from England. We all met up for a few concerts. Then came the NASCAR fandom friends: Kim from Alabama, Jenny from Florida, and many others through my NASCAR fan site.

A lot of people question meeting ‘strangers’ online – even my mother. I constantly hear the “you don’t know what kind of crazy people there are out there”. She’s right. There are crazy people out there. There are people on MySpace and Facebook who are constantly trolling to prey on unsuspecting people.

I have this philosophy that sometimes the people you meet in a far from normal way, like online, may turn out to be better friends than the people who are constantly around you. Do I ever see or hear from the people I graduated high school? Yes, rarely and mostly because I’ve been invited to my ten year reunion. Do I have contact with friends from school here when school isn’t in session? With the exemption of one or two, not really. Do I hear from my friends who are over five hundred miles away or across a totally different ocean? All the time.

I think distance and time tells the tale of any friendship and whether or not that person thinks of you as a friend or just someone that can they can benefit from in some way, shape, or form. While a lot of you may meet your lifelong friends by joining a sorority or the guy who lived next door to you as a kid is on your speed dial, the ones who are closest to me are the furthest away and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Tagged with: article • Friends • journalism • newspaper • Personal • School • Writing