time away vaca all the way kissing spray oy vey don’t say no way

I’ve been away from sl quite a bit lately. It’s the whole pace-of-life thing. Got a new job, so I’m on the steep ‘n greasy part of the learning curve with that. Got lotsa extracurricular stuff, too, so I’ve been short on time. So it’s been like a forced month-and-a-half-long vaca, with spotty exceptions.

The exceptions have been nice, but they’ve been brief, and time is everything in sl.

Of course, this is true of any kinda relationship. Just plain ol’ time with and proximity to the people you love are the glue that holds you together, that turns you and you into us. Common interests, attraction, fascination, sexual chemistry, intellectual chemistry, shared senses of humor, all of these things are catalysts. It’s time in the saddle that makes the horse and rider one.

And this brings up something really cool about sl, a key difference between sl and rl. It is much easier to spend much more time with your friends in sl than in rl. No question. That might be one reason everything in sl seems so accelerated. Relationships initiate faster, and they go further faster, in the 2nd than they do in the 1st. You can attribute this to a lack of inhibition, to natural tendency of virtual-world interactions to just blast right through barriers that would inhibit rl relational goodness. You might attribute it to the idea that sl is all about fantasies connecting with other fantasies. It isn’t real, right? So no matter what, no harm no foul. This gets at the heart of breaking down inhibition, of course.

But I think those things just get things started in sl. They’re the matches that light up the big fires. The fuel for the fires is time spent, inworld, interacting intensively witcho peeps, however you interact, and whatever you’re doing when you do.

Whadjoo say? “So what, Arg?” Is that what I heardja thinkin’? Mmm. I dunno. I think I’m saying all this to say, I am glad to have been forced to spend less time in sl. I think it’s been good for me to have the downtime. That downtime has been uptime in other ways. I’ve had more time to spend working on writing, I mean, stuff besides this blog. I’ve also learned from this less-intense sl period how much value time carries into my rl relationships.

Duh-moment? For sure. But I’m a pretty heedless person, and a weird sorta introvert/extrovert mix. It’s really easy for me to downplay the significance of time, and how I spend it, especially as it relates to spending it with peeps who are important to me. Sl, as always, is an excellent teacher. Here’s an example of what I mean: One of my sl friends loves to dance. So do I. We’ve gone dancing several times, and each of those times for about 3 or 4 hours. We danced and talked. And those times have been just so damn sweet. Profoundly so. I get so totally caught up in those moments that time becomes compressed. It’s like the effect you have when you drive waaay too fast on a really curvy road, and all the distances shrink so that what is really 400 feet away feels like it’s so close you could reach through the windshield and grab it, then, in an instant, it’s gone hissing by.

I come away from those moments goin’, “Man. I need to do that same kinda thing back here in the world-world.” It’s a good thing too. Me and this friend, we’re not new to each other anymore, so it’s not just novelty that makes this kinda thing so cool. It’s the deepening of the bond. It’s a good feelin’, ya know? It works in rl too. Unfortunately, you don’t get hours added to your day when you discover SecondLife.

Here’s another reason the vaca has been good. Sl is too intense in some ways for someone like me. If I spend too much time there, I really start to be there to a degree that’s probably not good. Rl and sl start to go all mergy on me, and I can’t stop that from happening. Maybe I’m mentally ill, I dunno. I do know that I live in my imagination a lot as it is, and that sl can overtake me very easily. This seems true in direct proportion to the amount of time I spend inworld. I could so easily become all about cybersex. I mean all about it. Those barriers I mentioned earlier? In rl, they push back at you, at least a little bit, almost everywhere. They don’t exist at all in sl. And, this is just my theory, the heart doesn’t know the difference between sex in rl and sex in sl. The body knows, I’m sure, but not the heart.

The more time I spent inworld, the closer I could feel myself coming to making rationalizations for involvements I knew I’d later regret. I could see it coming like a locomotive in the dark. And that scared me. I could feel myself goin’ outta control in a way that I don’t wanna. I think the present vaca has given me some distance that I needed to think about this clearly, to reassess my direction and decide. To decide.

But you know, I really miss sl, too. Popping in and out every now and then is just not the same as a long hot soak. I miss my friends. Some of them I almost never see, and the ones I do see more often, well, it’s just not the same. That makes me sad, but then that’s part of life, rl and sl. And I can live with that. In fact, it kinda makes life sweeter. Missing people is a very private experience, but it makes me realize how amazing and beautiful they are, and are the worlds we inhabit, both real and virtual.

~ by argyleboi on November 1, 2007.