Are people the same offline as they are online- or am I inundated with weirdos?

Here is one of those blogs that you hope your friends will never write about you. So, fair's fair. If I'm describing you, feel free to talk about me too. lol

I have met MANY people online. I have also taken some of those friendships offline and met people in person. This has had very mixed results. Some of the friendships are great, and I really value their opinion, and I get to laugh and cry and be goofy with them. Some have not been so great. My husband has teased me in the past that I only meet weirdos, and that I should make more friends in real life rather than via message boards and such. So, let's take a look.

Offline- I have a friend that plays games constantly. I wish I was exaggerating, but this person has spent the last few years playing an online game. My husband and I have reached out many times, but I honestly feel like I don't even know them anymore because I haven't had contact with them. We see them about twice a year, and talk online or otherwise about four times a year. All because of a game. I feel very unimportant.

Another couple I met was very into "A Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy". Frankly, I didn't get it. I got about three pages in and never read farther. When I told them I couldn't get into it, they looked at me like I had sprouted a third ear. They invited themselves along in an El Camino (already two people going and a third picked up along the way) on a multi-state trip. I was smart enough to tell them that this would NOT be happening. We swapped books, and the book I had given them was a gift from a friend of my husband. They found out who it was from, and because they were friends with his ex-wife, they gave her the book which was promptly sold. Their book is still sitting on my bookshelf waiting for them to replace my property that they had no right to sell. After we moved, we had a baby and came back to town to introduce all our friends to our son. The first words out of their mouth were about that damn book. Nice. Replace mine and it's all yours. Or better yet, since my book retails for $40, and yours was $5.95, just buy yourself a new copy.

Another was a dear friend that seemingly out of nowhere divorced her husband and moved out of state. He was completely distraught for a while. We figured that we just didn't know what was happening behind closed doors. And then she divorced the other guy the same way and married someone else, so she could move out of state. She had one marriage before the guy we knew. I don't know if there are any more after the last one. I still think of her fondly, but her love life seems a bit of a mess.

I could go on and on.... Instead, let me switch to the online friends.

I have had a lot of dear friends that have messed up love lives. One didn't seem to understand that you are flirting with trouble when you flirt with strange men at cheap bars, and collect their phone numbers. Yeah, that ended in divorce. Another doesn't seem to understand that you have to actually BE interesting enough that guys will be attracted to your beautiful personality, and that she IS interesting enough. But instead she PRETENDS to be interesting enough. She's a sweetheart, and I love her, and it kills me that she will change on a whim for a man who just cares about sex and not a relationship.

Or maybe the great internet flame war of '96. It involved some of the previous parties mentioned, a supposed former preacher, a supposed former model who was the brother of a man who died of natural causes. The preacher said something snarky one time to the brother, and the sister got very bent out of shape after he died. She hacked into a major internet portal and found that he had more than one screen name, but not before she endured many people calling her nuts herself. Well, of course she was right. So all the people who had supported the former preacher and said he wouldn't do it were proven wrong and made to look foolish. In the end, it took a few years off everyone's lifespans, and fractured what had been a nice little community, even if it was all based on a lie.

So is my husband right? Are people more sane offline than online? I think not. I think they are exactly the same. My neighbors still fight at two am right outside my window about who the girl slept with. Someone right up the street is probably going to leave their spouse on a whim. Hell, maybe the local Priest is sitting online flirting with a woman half-way across the country and causing mayhem through his various screennames. All of this is happening somewhere. With so many people having computers, it is naive to think that these people wouldn't be online, acting the same as they would offline.

This blog does not help my bleak view of the future of the world.