Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 802
So it's like official-official: Bongbong Marcos is going to be the next president of the Philippines on the 30th of June.
Moment of silence.
In other news, recently I've been thinking about online friends. There are some people that we used to hang out with before the pandemic that we still haven't quite reconnected with. Some I've totally unfriended for one reason or another. Others...we just remain at arms' length for some reason. And it's not like we want to hang out with everyone we're connected with online. However, there are those that we've repeatedly reached out to or invested online interaction time but it doesn't feel like things are going anywhere.
In some ways, you could look at it all like dating or something. Even for friends, you need to cultivate that relationship and see how things will progress. You start with talking online and such and eventually you want to translate things into something "more" real - this being hanging out in person. The pandemic had indefinitely deferred most of that, but now that things have loosened up a bit, there are still those people that we can't seem to pin down.
Of course, it probably goes both ways. There are those who have made soft efforts to sort of imply we could hang out that I don't bend over backward to accommodate. But that's how it is, right? Especially in these pandemic times, you end up wanting to be very selective about who you meet. If you're going to risk your health and safety with someone you're not that invested in as a friend, then it would really suck if you ended up getting COVID-19 because of someone who could be considered to be more of an acquaintance or whatever.
It's a weird thing to juggle and sometimes you can practically feel the wheels turning - whether ours or those of others. There are just those online conversations you end up handling very "politely", without jumping the gun and getting trapped in a hangout you don't want to do. And in other cases, we're the ones repeatedly shooting out invites or just messages to check on how certain people doing and it feels like we're getting shot down in return. The social media life is kind of funny in that manner - but not ha-ha funny but more weird-one-act-play kind of funny.
It's probably safer to divert people to O Bar instead of inviting them over - at least for the cases where we don't feel super comfortable just yet. We're still in the middle of a global pandemic and that is always something to consider. It's why our ongoing RPG campaigns are still 100% remote even though we could probably meet up in person at this point. Every interaction, even the safe ones, will still carry their level of risk.
So when are we going to meet up, guys? Or not?
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