Follow the Tagalong

Much of my experience and even identity over the past year has come from whom I follow around. I have been lucky enough to create friendships with some important SL people, and these people know other cool people and all the cool places and events; thus, just following them around has become a fulfilling activity in its own right. Along the way, you landmark lots of places and make lots of new friends, some of whom delete your friendship card within two weeks. But the point is, as a tagalong, you follow someone else's agenda and are often perceived as and even introduced as someone else's accessory. (Not that I mind that, especially since I am usually someone else's accessory; I'm just describing how it plays out.)

In the course of such tagging along with others, I had the lucky opportunity to bump into Ms. P. on many occasions, and gradually, as we began to recognize each other, we began to hang out and a friendship developed. Ms. P. is important in her own right--she's a major part of a high profile project and close to some SL super VIPs and communities--but for some reason she seems to relate to me more as a fellow tagalong than as a VIP. In many ways, she seems at least as interested in alle's Second Life as I am in Ms. P's Second Life.

Lately, we've come to start checking places out together as fellow explorers, where neither one of us leads the other, or, more accurately, where we trade leader and tagalong back and forth. We first became good friends dancing together at Blue Note, where we took turns on blue/pink dance balls, alternating dancing as male/female, leader/led, and those dances have become an allegory of our friendship. I look forward to our continued waltz around Second Life, two tagalongs following only our own lead.