A place for everything

Normally I blog about my sewing and occasionally some family stuff. But where do you put down the stuff you want to talk about when you have no one to discuss it with? Is this the right forum? I don't know. I do know that there are some things lately that confuse/bother/excite me, that I want to talk with friends about but I have none to talk to.

Well, that's not really true. I have some friends that I could talk to - if I didn't live in a distinctly different time zone from them and if we each didn't have at least 2 or 3 kids of our own. I really miss my friends from Germany, J., M., S., H. and K. But they're all spread far and wide and busy as hell and I don't have the opportunity to talk to them. J. lives in the same time zone as me but she has 5 kids and is terribly busy with them and their activities. M. lives on the east coast and I live on the west coast now, plus she's hard to get hold of and is busy making a new life since her divorce a few years back. S. lives in Hawaii right now and is super busy working and doing competitive paddling - team ocean kayaking, I think. She's always my go-to for political discussions and the like and easily makes counter-arguments to mine without sounding antagonistic. We always have good conversations and I miss being her neighbor. K. is still in Germany and is fun to talk to - she makes me forget things that are bothering me. But a 9-hour time difference is pretty hard to get over.

So where do I go to talk to people? My neighbor is a nice woman but she's also about 12 years younger than me. That sounds mean, but it's true. And sometimes I feel so old when I talk to her. Plus, she's not really enough like me that I feel we have anything in common. I do like her, though - I just don't know what kind of a conversation we would have if I brought up politics or economics or homeschooling/unschooling vs. traditional school, or extended nursing, or whatever.

So what IS the appropriate venue for discussions when one has no one to talk to in person? I have these discussions on facebook but they take so long it saps my energy. Like right now I've been 'discussing' politics with a woman I know from Germany. I don't think I'd call her my friend because we didn't deliberately do things together and our husbands didn't work together, but she was a close acquaintance. Anyway, she made a comment and I responded to it and we've been going back and forth on the topic of the president and the economy. She makes these statements which she doesn't back up with fact and then I refute her statement with facts. I'm not trying to argue with her or start a fight - I genuinely want to know how she feels and (more importantly) why she feels the way she does, since it's clearly negative. I feel like she'd feel different if she knew facts. And if she doesn't, that's fine but one's opinion should be based on an accurate assessment of facts, or at least a minimal understanding of them. She keeps dancing around the issue, saying one thing and then another and not sticking to any specific line other than her opinion that the president is blaming everyone else for the nation's economic situation and not doing anything about it. This is the kind of discussion that I love. But I feel like it's one-sided. Is facebook the right venue for this?

I know of another individual, whose blog I read, that is opinionated (in a good way) and open to discussing major issues, especially social ones. It happens that I live near enough to her that I could drive to her town, take her for coffee and discuss these things. But that seems weirdly inappropriate, and slightly like stalking. Is it? I mean, I've emailed with her, sent her links to articles I thought would interest her when it's a topic she's written about on her blog, that sort of thing. And I comment on her blog. I think she'd be fascinating to talk with in person but feel like it would be too weird to approach her, since I've sort of spied on her life through her blog. What's the right answer to that? I honestly don't know. I do know that I keep hoping that we'll somehow run into each other at the fabric store (or somewhere totally random) by accident and talk and then she'll decide whether or not I'm worth knowing in person, thereby taking the stress off of me.

In the meantime, I find myself talking about stuff that I care about with my eleven year-old, which is wildly dissatisfying, and with my husband which can be difficult because he doesn't always wait for me to finish a thought to offer his opinion and then I become frustrated with his interrupting me and stop the discussion out of anger - not the best sort of discussions.

Sigh. I need to get out more.