Is that really as much an admission of patheticness as it used to be? I suspect that a rather large number of people today who are active on the net have people there whom they would call their friends.

Last Friday night, my LSW Karyn and I had our second opportunity to get together with some of our friends from rmfo.net. Michaela had flown in (from Scotland!) to be Kirk’s date at one of the balls for President Bush’s innauguration. A bunch of us decided to take advantage of the rare situation and meet in Baltimore. Joe and Rhonda we had been with before (they stayed at our apartment for the Lynchburg Caedmons Call concert), and I’ve attended two of Joe’s own concerts. Chrisitiana has been at several of the aforementioned events, and now we live in the same town. And we got to meet a couple of guys we didnot know at all, Aaron (Whiteymike on rmfo) and Mic’s friend Cameron.

Like any or our dot net gatherings, much merriment ensued. Once all the main characters were assembled at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, we set off for our first restaurant of choice…which turned out to be closed for a private party. The next restaurant told us, inexplicably, that they could seat a party of eight (which we were at the moment) in half an hour, but nine (which we would be when Cameron arrived) would take two and a half hours! There was a Pizzeria Uno upstairs so we sent Kirk (who works for the Homeland Security Administration) ahead to scout it out. Now every restaurant on the Inner Harbor seemed to be hopelessly overcrowded, but suddenly the Uno has plenty of room. Nothing to do with Kirk’s government connections? I don’t believe it for a minute.

Once settled into our table (we were there so long we should’ve paid rent), the conversation was wonderful. Karyn and I learned about Mic’s experiences living for a year and a half on a missionary ship traveling around Asia. The guys solved all the problems of the American evangelical church over pints of Newcastle and Killians (and some fufu drink Kirk was having). And then there was the fiasco as the Bassetts and Traphagens tried to exit from the parking garage. The exit signs kept directing us higher and higher up the ramps, then for no reason reversed and headed us back down. We thought we were trapped in a mobius strip. At one point I opened my car door and yelled back to Joe, “Mommy! I just want to go home!”

At one point in the evening we were laughing together about trying to explain to “real life” friends why we would travel so far to be with people we previously knew as little avatar pictures an inch high. They just would’ve had to be there.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 23rd, 2005 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Christian Community, It`s All About Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.