Worrysome Aspects
1. My friends and I are on poor footing. We men are mice. DT, AD and I have all been single for forever. JR and AE are in long-term relationships they're not really happy with but don't have the willpower to break off, probably because they're afraid of being like people like me right now. It's a strange sort of ice age that's enveloping the majority of my good friends and it's unsettling. Particularly because we're all at a similar stage (nearing graduation) when change should be something we're expecting. What I'm saying is obvious so I don't think I need to go on.
Even more unsettling is how I'm getting farther away from my friends who are actually doing things with their lives. And by "getting farther away from" I mean calling them less and less, and it tends to be on my watch that communication gets disconnected, often for months. I don't really know what ED, BC, and LS are up to, and I especially don't like that those are supposed to be my three closest girl friends. Of course, they're all somewhat disconnected from me spatially (literally), so it's understandable, and probably a better conclusion is that I still don't really know how to manage friends of the opposite sex. At least not nearly as well as I manage my fellow men.
The burden of the past isn't so much the issue of remembering the past so much as it is being part of the "the past" schema. I doubt YZ and I will ever be the blood-brother-esque (not the band unfortunately) best friends we were back in the day, and I think it's because we are "back in the day" to each other. We reek like long distance relationships and parental conflicts and cultural confusion can when you know those things aren't going to matter again. What use am I to a burgeoning diplomat at an ivy league school? I foresee many, many years of increasingly infrequent (and they're already quite uncommon) get-togethers for drinks, reminiscing, and vague disapproval.
2. My brothers, who for forever was quite popular, told me tonight that he essentially has no friends. It was, like the above, unsettling. It looks as though there's this structure of friends that everyone has in their lives through high school and university that dissolves afterwards into a mess of everymanforhimselfselp. I've said for quite a while that the unspoken appeal of shows like Friends (for twenty-somethings) and Seinfeld (for thirty-somethings) is the continued existence of the social life. That when we're older we really will have friends instead of just going drinking with our fellow doctors every Friday and a barbecue with the old crowd every time someone has a birthday. Watching as our friends, one by one, get married off and die alone for all we care with how offended we are by it. Because I think that's the second biggest lie of those shows: that all these people stay single for so long, or at least remain loyal primarily to their friends. Not going to happen.
Even more unsettling is how I'm getting farther away from my friends who are actually doing things with their lives. And by "getting farther away from" I mean calling them less and less, and it tends to be on my watch that communication gets disconnected, often for months. I don't really know what ED, BC, and LS are up to, and I especially don't like that those are supposed to be my three closest girl friends. Of course, they're all somewhat disconnected from me spatially (literally), so it's understandable, and probably a better conclusion is that I still don't really know how to manage friends of the opposite sex. At least not nearly as well as I manage my fellow men.
The burden of the past isn't so much the issue of remembering the past so much as it is being part of the "the past" schema. I doubt YZ and I will ever be the blood-brother-esque (not the band unfortunately) best friends we were back in the day, and I think it's because we are "back in the day" to each other. We reek like long distance relationships and parental conflicts and cultural confusion can when you know those things aren't going to matter again. What use am I to a burgeoning diplomat at an ivy league school? I foresee many, many years of increasingly infrequent (and they're already quite uncommon) get-togethers for drinks, reminiscing, and vague disapproval.
2. My brothers, who for forever was quite popular, told me tonight that he essentially has no friends. It was, like the above, unsettling. It looks as though there's this structure of friends that everyone has in their lives through high school and university that dissolves afterwards into a mess of everymanforhimselfselp. I've said for quite a while that the unspoken appeal of shows like Friends (for twenty-somethings) and Seinfeld (for thirty-somethings) is the continued existence of the social life. That when we're older we really will have friends instead of just going drinking with our fellow doctors every Friday and a barbecue with the old crowd every time someone has a birthday. Watching as our friends, one by one, get married off and die alone for all we care with how offended we are by it. Because I think that's the second biggest lie of those shows: that all these people stay single for so long, or at least remain loyal primarily to their friends. Not going to happen.
posted by Minimalism Fanaticism at 3:01 AM
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