Odds

It’s hard to be my friend.

Years ago I remember hearing a motivational speaker talk about friendship. He asked everyone in the audience to hold up both hands with ten outstretched fingers representing their ten best friends. “Now,” he said. “Which of those friends, if you called them at 3 a.m. and said ‘Come quickly, I need you,’ would come without asking ‘Why?’” Within seconds most hands were holding up one, two, or at the most three fingers.

For the past several months, I’ve been writing and playing over at Tumblr, a social networking site that is a lot like Twitter without the word length restrictions. I had a fine time there and interacted with a number of amazing folks. I wound up following more than 100 people and reading their running commentary throughout the day. It turned into a part-time job.

Tumblr keeps track of the number of words one writes there; when I read a few days ago that I had recorded over 30,000 words there, I was shocked. Granted, some of those entries were things I had reassigned from here and other places, but 30,000 is a lot of words. There’s no telling how many I had read in that same amount of time.

So I sat down and asked myself, “Are these people in whom I’d want to invest that much time in real life?” The answer surprised me. With about 30 exceptions, the answer was probably not. It wasn’t a judgment call. All the people I followed were good people — not a bad banana in the bunch. But my time is limited and valuable, if only to me. Writing, painting, playing music and the thinking involved in doing them are extremely time-consuming. There was no way I could keep reading through 100+ contributors’ entries and making my own without sacrificing things that were much more precious to me.

Unlike Michele (my second-favorite Tumblr comrade), I’m a true addict. I can’t tell myself thirty minutes and no more; I have to either give my all or walk away. I chose the latter. I’ll keep up with those bloggers I admire — I’ll even link them from here. But I long for the sort of conversation Tumblr does not now provide (conversation my personal site and its forum, The Pub, allow), and I’m willing to risk having no “Tumblarity” to write simply and honestly in a place where I’m not acting as an entertainer, but creating a scrapbook of things that interest me, sharing them with friends, and working through creative issues along the way.

In the meantime, I can’t wait to see what my Tumblr friends turn up next.

In moderation.

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