Inworld friends?

The Looking Glass

Curtain open, the stage is ready. Last call, ladies and gentlemen, last call, all actors on stage. It’s a given fact that our so-called Second Life friends’ list is more likely a fat list of distant acquaintances rather than true friends. Nobody sane would think of those hundred plus names as true friends, people you hang out and share your deepest insecurities with. That is why some Second Lifers have cyclic fits of onslaught and basically do away with half of their friends’ list. Then, taken by an overwhelming feeling of guilt, they add to their profiles true examples of literary achievement such as “if I have deleted you it’s because I cannot remember you or because we haven’t talk in months”. There, solved. I have to admit that I only noticed being removed from someone’s list a couple of times. I also have to admit that the first time was a bit upsetting; I kept thinking if I had said something wrong, but then the above transcribed message cleared it – I hadn’t talked to this person in months or was it because this person didn’t quite remember who I was? - and I moved on. The so-called friends’ list is and has always been a contacts’ list (a rather more appropriate designation, if you ask me); hundreds of names that are nothing more than names plus a note in their profiles – DJ, artist, singer, manager, store owner, hunt organizer, store client, fan (well, no, not really, but it did look good in this list). I always defended that there was no need to trim a contacts’ list exactly because it WAS a contacts’ list and not a friends’ list. So, for years, I let my list grow and grow. Until one day, I got sick of Second Life (one of those moments…) and decided to delete everyone but those who really mattered. And so I did. It was no easy task, I tell you, but no one complained, so I guess I was neither a case of someone mysteriously disappearing nor a friend. Plus, I became just like all the other Second Lifers, a murderer of friends’ lists… tsk, tsk… All actors on stage, the ones still alive, at least, and let the playing continue.