What we need is a game plan

I'm only doing this now because I have developed a physical aversion to my work. Updating my blog, checking my email, they all give the illusion of accomplishment without making me go anywhere near the stack of orders I have to either send or get ready for pickup. Maybe the graduates in the photographs wouldn't understand my need to avoid them, but I'm trusting that everyone else will.

I need a life, in the worst kind of way. I need friends who don't live an ocean away, and a place where I can sit and hang out with these closer friends. Maybe in this imaginary world I would have someone to go to the zoo with. And there would be balloons, and birthday cake...and wait. I just described the birthday party I wanted when I was a kid. Either way, the fact remains that much as I love and am grateful for the friends who still make time for me when they're six hours ahead of me at all times, I work way too much. I can justify it because most of that work I can still do while talking online, but eventually everyone else will find better things to do with their time than sitting up at their computers to talk to me, and then I'll just turn into a bitter, lonely old woman. Happy people will shun me. I'll spend my evenings talking to cats. And then when I die none of my friends will be at the funeral because you're all too far away to get here. And somehow it all ends in the detruction of the universe, but I won't follow that train of thought any farther.

So short of hanging around in bars or joining a cult church, what is the best way for someone who isn't in school and doesn't work in an office with other people to make friends? I could start handing out candy to people on the street, with a business card attached to it saying, "Hi, my name is Amy. If you enjoyed your candy, please consider being my friend and hanging out with me on the weekends." What do you think?