{"id":173,"date":"2006-07-31T21:03:22","date_gmt":"2006-08-01T01:03:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/2006\/07\/31\/lets-pretend-the-world-isnt-burning-down\/"},"modified":"2006-07-31T21:05:43","modified_gmt":"2006-08-01T01:05:43","slug":"lets-pretend-the-world-isnt-burning-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/2006\/07\/31\/lets-pretend-the-world-isnt-burning-down\/","title":{"rendered":"Let&#8217;s Pretend the World Isn&#8217;t Burning Down"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This month has really been a month of intense social situations around large groups of friends I rarely see followed by periods in between of recovery and idleness.  It&#8217;s really been a hot and cold time.  I went about two to three weeks physically and emotionally spent getting over Cornerstone week and just as I was beginning to acclimate to &#8220;normal&#8221; life again, we hosted a whole bunch of people at our house for the weekend.  Now I suspect it will take another week or so to normalize again.  <\/p>\n<p>I always come away from these gatherings regretting that I really didn&#8217;t have any meaningful conversations with people.  It always seems like I never get deeper than casual conversation or small talk.  I always leave wishing I&#8217;d gotten to know people more or empathized about fears, struggles, and hopes.  Part of that comes from being a host or planner, I guess, because I feel responsible for making sure people are having a good time during the entire time, so I don&#8217;t feel like I should be devoting too much time to one person or group of persons. <\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the funny thing about being a part of an online community, though.  We <em>already<\/em> spend our time discussing weighty topics like politics and religion.  We already share our burdens, moan about the inane, and mourn with each other.  Maybe when we actually <em>see<\/em> each other, everyone is already spent from discussing heavier matters online and people just want to forget about all that for a weekend.  I don&#8217;t know.  It seems so different from whenever I meet with &#8220;real life&#8221; friends and all we do is discuss all our problems, or worse, gossip about everyone else.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s always hard to emotionally stablize from intense events like this weekend, but I&#8217;m glad we had a chance to host everyone, and forget about all the world&#8217;s problems for a while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This month has really been a month of intense social situations around large groups of friends I rarely see followed by periods in between of recovery and idleness. It&#8217;s really been a hot and cold time. I went about two &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/2006\/07\/31\/lets-pretend-the-world-isnt-burning-down\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thy-mercy-my-god"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedirtroad.net\/jeff\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}