Making
friends, real ones.
Finding someone you can respect, and maybe learn from.
Acquiring a sense of respect for the old guard, the Establishment. Seeking to be the best noder one can be, not to be the most powerful or respected, or to twist it so that E2 is more fair.
Seeing E2 filled to the brim with new noders, and more every day.
Seeing more and more of that old guard, that which made E2 what it was and is, slip away - from fatigue, frustration, conflict, real life, or just loss of interest - seeing all my heroes fade. Seeing more and more each day a gathering army on the horizon, a band of selfish, immature, shortsighted noders from all corners of the net, who want not to node for the ages, but only for themselves. If that much. To see the chatterbox full more and more of a community that I don't know, and that I can identify with less and less. Wishing I had been here just a little earlier, so I could have really known those legends who have long passed from everything's halls, and befriended more fully those whom I did know, so that the bond we forged did not disappear when they left. Wishing, more and more often, that Other Users be frozen, no new noders, no one leaving.
Seeing something else on the horizon, perhaps - if I peer hard enough - a glimmer - seeing rising noders who seem to possess that ineffable spirit which I once sensed in all of everything - and hoping, praying that they are more able than I to make it a better place, to preserve the customs and traditions while injecting all the while the life of a hundred imaginations - for that is all anyone is here for.
And maybe, perhaps, coming upon a node which makes me smile, or think, and looking forward to nodes to come...