Horizons

Make new friends,
but keep the old.
One is silver,
the other is gold.

~Girl Scout Anthem

I admit that when I first read Joel Johnson’s Why I Stalk a Sexy Black Woman On Twitter, And Why You Should Too post, I was at first slightly offended, but then inspired.  I understood what he meant.  While I enjoy the interaction on my main social networking haunts, my friend list is becoming WAAAAAYYYY too incestuous.  I love that I’ve connected my friends w/ some of my other friends.  It’s also cool that I’ve made new friends through some of my oldest and most trusted comrades, but I am the type of person that gets claustrophobic REAL quick.

When my walls/worlds seem as though they are colliding too much – I usually disappear for a bit.  When I found out that I had only ONE degree of separation between myself and Kat Stacks, I laughed…but then I was like DAMN.  I need a new outlet…and re-evaluate WHY I call summa y’all my friends *cough* #iBlameTed.  When I was a moderator on that celeb/athlete wives message board, I didn’t know any of the members in real life at first and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.  I also had a place to go when I wanted to act silly and get up on the behind the scenes info before anyone else.  But the beauty of the site was that it also had several other forums for me to escape to, while I still had my other blog life.

The last few days on Twitter, I’ve noticed that my tweeps are beginning to rehash some of the same issues that used to surface on my other internet haunts  at the beginning of the millenium.  Interestingly enough, I’m running into some of the same personalities from those days as well.  So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.  But the constant back and forth about black/white/male/female privilege, light-skin vs. dark-skin, etc. etc.  is wearing on my nerves.

I thought about that a lot today and then tonight, I was looking on Diva’s site.  She mentioned feeling the same way, but being disappointed the other sites she found.  Someone dropped a link  for 30-something bloggers.  They seem to be a diverse group of a little over 100 – from different places and racial backgrounds.  So on a whim, I decided to join…and brought a couple of friends along for the ride.  :-) Not saying that I’m going to stick around there or abandon my usual cyber-coffee joints, but at least that gives me another outlet – another social escape from a different perspective.  I’ll be looking for some other places too.

I think that it’s healthy to keep your interests varied – especially when you begin to feel monotonous.  It’s the reason that I joined (and left and created an alias) on Facebook, moved to Twitter, and kept changed blog addresses like tissue.  Unlike Joel, I won’t be lurking and stalking segzy white people any time soon, but I am definitely excited about jumping into a new network of 30something bloggers like me.