Last night I was blessed with the job of riding sweep on the CBC’s Monday Night Beginner’s Ride. I started riding this ride back in March and have since gone from this being a hard workout for me to a pleasant, easy outing with friends. Until last night, however, I still thought of myself as a beginner.

As I was getting my gear together I met S., a very nice young lady who was looking for the ride leader. She was a true beginner with borrowed bike and gear, anxious to start riding and looking for guidance. I pointed out Carol, our leader for the night and made some small talk with her while I was unloading my bike.

Last night we actually had a number of beginners riding rather than a group of seasoned riders looking for a recovery ride after the weekend. Carol asked me if I would mind riding sweep and I thought it was a good opportunity to give back a little to the bike club that had nurtured me as I was riding. I didn’t realize how much of an eye opener this little job would be for me nor what a blessing I was receiving.

We left out from the parking lot and I dutifully took up my position in the back of the pack. This is not a strange position for me. I’m not a fast rider and this is where I usually find myself riding, though here lately I’ve found myself at the front on these Monday night rides. Still on other nights with longer rides and more experienced riders I am at the back struggling to keep up.

About a mile and a half into this ride I noticed S. was struggling. I rode up beside her to see how she was doing. The look on her face told me she was in trouble. “My legs are fine,” she said, “but my stomach is really hurting me.” I had had a similar problem last week. I asked her, “ When did you last eat and what was it you ate?” “Pasta, about an hour and a half ago,” she replied.

She was riding on a full stomach and her lack of conditioning made this problem show itself early. As I said, I had done something similar last week. I knew I needed something and chose something a bit too heavy too soon before my ride. Both my legs and my stomach were looking for blood flow and my legs won out causing my stomach to just sit there with a load of work it couldn’t perform. Stomachs complain when that happens. She was experiencing that now.

I stayed with her. She rode to the turn around and then back to the parking lot, apologizing to me the whole way back, just like I have when people have held back for me. That’s when it hit me, these people were glad to ride with me, to encourage me the way they had been encouraged. S. had just given me a blessing she will never know until she hangs with a new rider as they struggle along acquiring the conditioning and skills they need.

Thanks, S., you blessed me with your company last night. Just don’t get discouraged. Keep riding and you will someday be blessed as you blessed me.

A couple of things caught my attention today about Facebook and social media in general. The first was a link on Flutterby to Leo Laporte’s Buzz Kill where Leo is discovers that Google’s Buzz has quit updating his timeline several days after several days and numerous updates. Everything he wrote during those days just hit the bit bucket and no one noticed, not even him.

The second was Celeste’s observation that Facebook has distorted our idea of friends. How can someone be my friend who I’ve never met and never have had more than just a chance encounter on a social media website? This is bothering her and, frankly, it has also been bothering me and I just hadn’t been able to pin down the irritation as well as she has.

So this has me thinking, most of the stuff I write I do so hoping to provoke some kind of conversation among my friends. I like to think that people are reading what I write but more than that I hope that what I write, regardless of how trivial, makes a person pause just long enough to think about it. Hopefully it will provoke enough thought that they will respond and a conversation will have started.

But why would someone that never talks to me care and why would I care to offer my little thoughts and ideas to someone who just wants to be my friend so they can add to the size of their Mafia in Mafia Wars? I really don’t want to be like Leo and just be writing this stuff to fall on deaf eyes.

Back in 2001 I started my weblog. When I first began writing I actually had a good number of readers but, then, that was 2001 and the people that were reading weblogs back then didn’t have the vast number of weblogs to read as they do today. I could count on just about everything I wrote to have a comment or two on it. As the number of weblogs increased the fewer visitors I got and the fewer comments I got.

Finally I got out of the habit of writing on my weblog and there would sometimes be months go by between entries. The less I wrote the fewer people I had visiting and the even fewer comments I had on my entries. When I found Facebook here was a way for me to get the convesations I was looking for because now everyone was on Facebook, not just the few geeky friends I had that were reading my weblog.

The difference is that on my weblog you don’t have to be my friend to read what I write while on Facebook you do. I want a lot of people to be able to access most of my writing but I also want some of my writing to only be between me and my friends. But, my friends on Facebook also include some people that I bully into becoming my friend so to add numbers to my Mafia in Mafia Wars and I don’t play those games any more. I want being my friend on Facebook to actually mean something.

So what am I getting at? I’m not sure at this point. Both the article Dan linked to and the comment Celeste made seem to be related in some manner to how I view my online writings. I’m really feeling a need to pare down my friends list to people who actually mean something to me or people who have indicated that what I write on Facebook brings them value in some way. There are things I want to write for them and not for people that have no meaning to me at all. However, I still want to have access to the rest of the world for some of my writings.