Dinner and Movie Meetup - My First Event

Shawn, the one with the grin, is the organizer

I finally attended a meetup.  For those of you who don't know me, and you may be many but you're probably a select few, I am part of several meetup groups.  I don't know why I do this but I can easily join a meetup, get announcements for meetings and then I don't go.  It's gotta be annoying for organizers because, I am probably not the only one.  Anyway, I went to my first meetup and I had a great time.  I joined a group of 30 and we met at the Starlight Diner, not far from the 34th Street AMC movie theater, to have dinner.  Afterwards we went to see Guardians of the Galaxy.  I got to meet a lot of nice people.  Shawn is the organizer of the meetup.  I can't wait to go to another dinner-and-movie meetup since this was a pretty easy event to attend.

Meetup is a great idea to meet new people who enjoy the things that you like.  It's easy to find any type of group in your city.  Of course, the website is Meetup.com.  One of the things, in a technology obsessed culture like ours, that have gone by the wayside is cultivating friendships on a reality level.  I don't care what anybody says, I just don't think a Facebook friend is a friend.  And yes, I know that people go on Facebook to have thousands of friends, but what does it mean at the end of the day?  I'm biased because I don't have a Facebook account.  And I may open one in the future, but I just think it's odd to count Facebook friends as real friends.  At some point, relationships will probably flower from those group of contacts but, I'm not sure that those people are presenting their real selves.  Besides, it would be hard to hold these Facebook friends accountable to their real identity.

It's far healthier to have real time friends.  It's more of a commitment, but that's part of the whole deal.  We have, as part of our mythic traditions, the rugged individualist.  But in reality, our society has thrived more by people coming together and doing things together.  I can remember from my history class that people had the barn-raisings when the West was settled.  The keen French observer of American life, Alexis de Tocqueville, was surprised by all the volunteer organizations that we had and called us "a nation of joiners" in his book, Democracy in America.  Americans are joiners because each of us know that having friends or a network of people with whom we can have relationships with is what makes our life fun.

Now, I do not deny that there are all sorts of dysfunctional people out there.  But it is up to you whether the dysfunction is something that you can tolerate or not.  I would never advocate suffering a toxic relationship.  However, just as with anything, you have to discern what relationships are healthy for you and what are not.  And the more relationships you have, the better you will be at discerning what is a good relationship for you.  Good relationships are hard to come by and Facebook friends just don't cut it.