As I sit on my new/used couch, that I got for free this weekend from craigslist, I think about why online social networking is so important to me. With the new site www.facebook.com I hear many friends and peers talk about why it’s a “waste of time”, and I have to ask myself, am I really just wasting my time here? I can’t imagine it to be the case, mainly, because I have found so many like-minded people through online forums, and bonded deeply with them.

Years ago, after raving and finding parties through Hullabaloo someone mentioned to me about the Om festival at a party, and I asked in a forum where I could find information about this magical festival, that I heard about for 2 hours in a stairwell of the BigBop. A user named Gollum posted a link to the Om website, and I joined the Om list. All of a sudden, I’d get 100 emails a day in my inbox, all about interesting philosophy, open hearted approaches to situations and invites to potlucks. Omies are the first crew of online socialites that I knew, and it wasn’t long before I dubbed them all my crew, broke off with my boyfriend and claimed to have found something incredible. I had invited the whole list to my cottage within a month, and they all showed up with sound gear, decks, computers and visuals. What a party and they were all so damn creative too!

We had years of good parties, and I learned a lot from everyone – it changed me from inside out, and everyone was so open, searching for truth, and accepting of most people who would come in and get involved. Om gave me a reason to be creative again – unlike the office – and when Davy came home from England I began juggling again too! This is where contact and poi became a new found obsession (little did I know)…

After years of good times in real life and online with all these folks, I moved to BC and was told to go to www.tribalharmonix.org, where I met a network of the same sort of folk, all whom seemed connected to the crew in Toronto. Through these networks I got a job the day I arrived in Vancouver, Yogi’s Vegetarian Indian Restaurant, where I still work. I looked up places to live in “Shelter and Spaces” there, and found a home in the Freakbox for 2 years. Those Freakbox years were amazing, and deeply integrated me into Vancouver quickly. Jessica my upstairs neighbour even said at a party a month after I was there “Wow, you already know more people than I do”…

Davy had also mentioned a website that I started to browse called contactjuggling.org, where I began to watch video clips (through my 56k modem) of contact juggling. I learned through this website everything I knew about contact because I knew of no one doing this anywhere around me. I made a post introducing myself, and Ryan answered, mistaking me for another Dawn he knew from the Vancouver area. He was living in London and added me to his MSN, and when he came back to Canada to renew his Visa, we met at a small juggling gathering I was trying to put together. We decided to travel together to the Victoria juggling festival, and that’s where I fell for him. We had 1 date before he moved back to London, but kept in contact through MSN and email… along with dozens of hand-written letters.

I began to save money to travel to England – he beat me to it and came back for a visit, but by then I was determined to go to England and Europe. Ryan went back to the Hanger and put me up for a lot of the time. This is where I began to meet everyone I had learned contact juggling from through internet video years previous…

Now Ryan lives with me, and we laugh because of our balls all over the house, and how that all seems right. Many Omies moved to Vancouver also, and they are still the closest friends I’ve got. Tribal Harmonix people continuously are creating events and actions which are creative and progressive and that I love taking part in (when school doesn’t take all my time). My apartment, my roommates, the fact that I go to school and juggle, my furniture and the people I am interested in all come together through a thread of internet networkings by one or two degrees. This thing has infiltrated my life, and people call it a waste of time?