Day 9: A friend in need

I have always said that when a fellow blogger best friend is in need that I will come to the aid of that blogger friend and be there for him or her. It seems that time has come and I now will do what I can.

My blogger friend, Aswin, who lives in a country called India is addicted to something he calls Online F1 Management Game. It seems he needs some other F1 Gamers to help him out with a project that does not involve his asking gamers for money. So if any of my loyal blogger friends has the ability to help him out, please check out his great site and let him know because I'm sure he would appreciate it and he is just so sweet like my other blog friend, Alejo, who inspired me to eat chocolate with my neighbor.

So speaking of my neighbor, it appears that he just must have so much responsibility taking care of his cat and feeding him and changing his litter box, that it just doesn't look like he's going to have time to commit to a friendship with me. I am sure he is disappointed, but I slipped a note in his mailbox and just said, "I have always believed that taking care of an animal that is a pet holds great importance in the world and I admire your strength to sacrifice a friendship you want desperately in order to help out that cat of yours."

So it really does seem that my journey to find friends is making me much less selfish and that I am caring more and more about others, even though I didn't even expect that to happen. But it also is the case that I ran into a person that I knew 9 years ago and it comes to be that I didn't even know who he was. So I guess it's as someone who was a wise old lady used to always say, "There are two sides of every coin, and one will be dirty and one will be clean."

Love,
Orchard

Days 7, 8: My blog friend helps me find an earth friend

Well, it's actually turned out to be quite a weekend even though when I got up yesterday morning, I thought it would just be another Saturday and then a Sunday for the next day. It seems that one of my best blogger friends has written a blog which is in the Spanish language and also in English with lots of pictures and interesting thoughts. He has called his blog, Bitácora de Sobremesas, which is a name that is not in English, but I am so happy that he visited my blog and said that he would like to link my blog to his.

Well, I was just touched by this lovely gesture of community that I was very inspired. So I went outside to my neighbor whose car and driveway I was shoveling during the dangerous New York snowstorm last week, and I knocked on his door and asked him to come and have an M*Azing crunch candy bar with me. He didn't say anything, so I explained that I saw this candy on a television show that is called The Apprentice, and that I got this candy bar in my stocking this year for Christmas, which I celebrate with stockings.

I asked if he was feeling better from his illness that made him shut the door on me earlier this week, and he said he felt he might be coming down with that same illness again. But before that illness took over him, I put my foot in the way of his door and said, "Milk chocolate with M & M's minis and crunchy chocolate candies." It turns out that my neighbor has a real penchant for chocolate, which is good for a neighbor like me to know, and he couldn't resist my offer, so he came over and we ate the candy bar together.

So now that I have found a best friend that is in the earth world, not only in the blog world, I feel very sure that I will have so many more exciting tales to tell you to help all the others find blog and earth friends. I might be busy doing items with my new friend all of the time, but I want you to know that I won't abandon my blogger friends. Because when I really get to thinking about it, this never would have happened if my blogger friend, Alejo, hadn't posted such a sweet post and made me feel that sense of community that got me to share my M*Azing bar from The Apprentice which now has another season on for college kids versus high school kids who are self-made.

Love,

Orchard (and my neighbor--who isn't here right now because he had to go change his cat's litter box yesterday, but I'm sure he will be back and will help me with ideas for my blog about me and him and my other friend adventures)

Day 6: Life and dice

Well, when I ate my Cheerios and Life cereal this morning, I was reminded of that game Life and how I played it with myself when I was a child. I always wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer because they made a lot of money in the game, even though they may have had to invest a little of that money in college first. But I got to thinking how you got your career in Life by rolling the dice and I thought to myself this: Should I role dice to get my friends like how I got a career in the game of Life?

Well, it was a new thought for me, but I never like to dismiss any of my thoughts because what if that one thought I dismiss is the cure for cancer or the thought on how to end war? So I didn't dismiss this thought and instead started rolling a die in the place where I live. So as I was rolling, I saw I kept getting 4s and 1s and 3s and 2s and even some 5s and 6s. I thought this was a lot of coincidence, but I also thought maybe it was telling me I'd have between 1-6 new friends.

So I'm sharing this with you now because if you're one of my new 6 friends, maybe you should tell me, because if you don't, then I might think I misinterpreted my thought and it might mean I have to move to Atlantic City and play the dice there and that really would mean I wouldn't be able to blog because I don't know if I'd have to pay for the internet there or if they'd let me use it for free.

love,

Orchard P. Dirk

Day 5: In honor of those who don't have snow

Well, it doesn't seem I'm depressed about no one writing on my blog, because it seems they did write, but just not when I thought they were going to. So I'm quite not depressed anymore, but the whole experience has given me insight into something very important. Today it seems that I'm thinking much more about other people than I am myself, which is often what I do when I am being selfless, which is much of the time, and my thoughts about other people today are this: I wonder how many other people are like me and trying to find friends like I am and making mistakes like I am?

I noticed a very insightful comment one of my best friend bloggers posted on my website. The blogger, Brick Wall, said, "Trying to be nice is good but sometimes it has its drawbacks."

That statement got me to thinking about all the other people in the world who don't even know what Pilates is or who maybe don't even have snow fall on their neighbors' cars, and I realized there are so many people far worse off than I. Because while I feel badly sometimes when even my best friends don't post and throw me into depression, there are probably people like me in Idaho or Australia that don't even know what a blog is and I really should be thinking of how to open the world up to them. So if you want to comment today about that, about how there are others like that--and maybe you know one and maybe you are one, well, this seems to be a good time to post those comments.

So today, instead of talking about my problems, I want to just say this to those people in places like Australia: There are a lot of people who want to be your friend, so don't dismay over not having snow, because you could just clean the bugs off of your neighbor's car and that is probably as good as snow anyway.

Love,
and in honor of those poor people who can't read my blog because they don't know how,

Orch

Day 4: Depressed because you guys won't write to me

Well, it seems I don't have much to tell you today. I didn't call to be in the Pilates class yet because I got so excited that people were writing in on my blog. But it also seems that when I woke up this morning and ran to my blog, I realized no one had written anything new for me. That really threw me into quite a depression today and I'm not even going to make my writing be in different colors like I always do, because I just don't have the heart for it.

So while I was being depressed today, I didn't do much of anything but try out my new eliptical exercise machine. The machine was nice to try out, but it didn't feel like it was working me out in all the ways I needed and it's like I always say, If something isn't working out the way you wanted it to, why are you still doing it?

So I don't know how much more I'll work out on my Gazelle eliptical machine. But I do know that today has been a sad day for Orchard because while I really do want to make friends, maybe I'm just too emotionally sensitive to all this rejection when even my best blogger friends don't post a comment every day and leave me to work on my Gazelle which isn't even doing all the stuff I wanted it to.

I hope still love,
orchard

Day 3: My neighbor was sick and now on to Pilates!

Well, as it turns out, my neighbor and I didn't watch The Nanny tv afterall. I asked him in a real nice sweet high pitched voice, as high as I could manage, but he must have been sick and had to rush to the bathroom because he closed the door on me really fast and didn't even have time to reschedule our plans.

So I think that I'll let that neighbor get over his illness before I invite him over to watch The Nanny again because really, when I get to thinking about it, I don't want to watch The Nanny with someone who is going to be sick and maybe even get me sick, because in the end, isn't health the most important thing?

So I was telling my problem to the man bagging my groceries at the Stop and Shop and he seemed to think it was a good idea for me to go to a class. He said people at classes were always looking to meet friends, and so now I think the most important thing for me to do is to go down to the YWCA and sign myself up for a class. I think it might be a class called, "Pilates" which looks like you should call it "pilots" and I did, but I guess that is just the funny way to pronounce it because the lady on the phone laughed when I said it that way. She called it like it was French or something and said, "Pah-LAH-tease". So I might pretend I'm French and call it that too when I call back to sign up for my new best friend class. But I really think saying it the French way is funnier than saying it the regular way.

love,
Orchard P. Dirk

Day 2: My plan to watch The Nanny with my neighbor

So I got to thinking about my experience with my neighbor yesterday and the thought that I had was this: Maybe when I thought he was telling me to stop broom-shoveling his car, he really only said it because he had a hard time accepting something nice a neighbor did for him.
So now I've decided that he probably wants me to ask him to come over and watch a movie with me on tv. I think there will be reruns of The Nanny playing on some cable channel. I know it's not exactly a movie, but that Nanny sure is something else, and I'd like to share a laugh or two with my neighbor who is too scared to admit he wants a friend in me.

So that is my plan and I just wanted to share with all my loyal bloggers. I can see no one else has posted any comments on my blog. That's probably because you are all a little scared of letting a new friend into your life too, but I'm here to tell you you don't have to be. If you want to share something exciting or scary that happened when you were trying to find a new friend, or if you have any ideas of how I should deal with finding my new friends, feel free to share.

Okay, well, have a good day!

love,
Orchard P.

Day 1: A blog about finding friends

Well, it seems when I woke up this morning, I realized a lot of people in this world have a lot of friends, but it also seems there are a few who don't as much. So my mind suddenly had an interesting idea to write a blog about those second people I've mentioned because they often don't get the kind of attention they deserve because they don't have their friends to give them that attention.

So I'm going to tell you about my own journey to find friends because I've noticed that people seem to get valuable things out of other people's life experiences, and since I always have experiences every day, I thought I'd share!

This is what happened to me today in my journey to find friends:

There is a big snow storm where I live in New York state and so I was shoveling a driveway. It wasn't my driveway because I don't have a driveway, but it was someone else's driveway. I thought I'd be nice and shovel it. I didn't have a real shovel, but I was using a broom, which I thought was pretty clever.

So I used the broom to shovel my neighbor's driveway, but then his neighbor yelled at me, "Hey, kid!" he shouted--but I am not really a kid. So he shouted this and then he told me to stop putting snow in his yard. I wasn't trying to, but I guess part of the snow on the broom was getting tossed into his yard because while snow is really heavy to shovel, sometimes it's light and flies away.

I was a bit discouraged after that because I thought maybe I would make a friend by broom shoveling someone's driveway, but I guess I was wrong. The neighbor whose driveway I was shoveling just looked out the window and said, "What are you doing?" When I said I was broom shoveling his driveway, he came out and grabbed my broom and said I was scratching his car.

So then I took the broom back into my house and stopped broom shoveling. The broom made a lot of puddles in my house, so then I had to wipe them up with a towel and I'll probably have to clean my broom too because what's the sense of using a dirty broom, but I'm really just happy that maybe I have a new friend who is my neighbor.

love,
Orchard