So Time Three for the Mug Club last night---I’m out with my friend Joy, who’s leaving this mortal coil (read: Cambridge) for greener pastures in a few months. She’s downing coffee and beer, I’m sticking with the beer only.
“I don’t have a Senior Spring, Ryan!” she said, coyly running her foot up my leg. OK, that’s a lie, but a fun one. “I just don’t like the think I may never see my friends again, ya know?”
Separation anxiety. Pretty common, of course, anytime you pick up your stakes and move the circus of your life somewhere else. Me, myself, and I---not no bothersome. It could be because I have no friends, which would be funny if I said, but not you, so don’t try, OK? I’m generally not at a loss for a general set of friends, but very few close enough to really keep in contact with if distance prevents easy contact.
Fact: I went to a boarding school. Fact: From the age of 14 on, I’ve been subjected to a ritualistic shedding of friends each Fall. Fact: I’m so used to this factoid that statement like Joy’s still take me back a bit, since I forget that it’s not this way with everyone.
Here’s a good way to think about my social circle since 1994: picture me at the center of the Sgt. Pepper album cover, surrounded by whomever I considered a friend that year. This ranges from “eats meals with 5 times a week” to “will stop and say a brief hello on the way to class”. Here’s a god thumbnote for all you kids trying to count the number of friends you have: if they stop to talk to you on the way to class, they are a friend. If they slow momentum due to being late but still exchange a bit, still friends. If they swiftly move by, showing no signs of slowing, and simply say, “Hey,” they are acquaintances. Just clearing that up.
Anyways, Ryan’s Lonely Friends Club Band. Now, do a selective face morph a la the “Black and White” video for each passing Fall. Not all the faces changes yearly; I don’t pull a social Etch-a-Sketch out, shake it, and start anew. But go out 4 years from any point, and you’ll find nearly none of the same faces.
Do I regret this? In some cases, sure. But around the age of 20, I decided that, after a certain amount of my invitations to correspond, to hang out, to come to a party, I would simply give up. Kinda harsh, some people think/thought. To me, it was always about self-preservation---why bother putting in all the effort if the other party clearly isn’t even extended remotely the same effort? On good days, you purge yourself of negative kharma. On bad days, you feel pretty alone.
As I met Joy last night at Rock Bottom, I ran into two of last year’s Friend Club. They weren’t great friends, but we did shows together, they generally seemed happy to see me when I was around, emails flew back and forth, etc. Since I stopped doing theatre, however, they---along with most of the people who were friends while I did theatre with them---fell off the face of my earth, and I off theirs. Are they evil? Heck no. But these things happen. In college, you blink and a semester has gone by, and it’s not until you run smack dab into them that you realize, oops, it’s been eight weeks since you’ve seen them. In the working world, this works sometimes over seasons. (Except in New England, where we have no seasons, just the meteorological equivalent of a bad bathroom shower; in the words of Eddie Izzard, it’s either “fantastically hot…or f#ckin’ freezin’!”)
These two former Club members were, nicely enough, really happy to see me, we caught up (not that there’s much catching up to do in my life---oddly enough, even though I don’t hang with them, they seem to know a lot about me, which is both nice and “nice” is that “Hee, hee, honey, grab the knife subtly and kill the cute demon in our kitchen” way), and that was that.
Are we gonna start up a bocci club cuz of this one encounter? No, but the point I guess, in all of this, is that fears such as Joy’s are natural but as unfounded as you allow them to be. If you want to keep in touch, keep in touch. It’s like going to the supermarket when you need food. You don’t sit around the house, moping at an empty fridge, for months on end. You go to the store. Get what you need for nourishment. Come back home. If the store doesn’t have what you need, there’s always another store nearby that may not have what you want, but you just might find, you’ll get what you need.
On that note, after I got home, lo, another member of the Club was online. This was the special “Ryan’s Blogger Buddies Club” though, and it’s not like I’m ever gonna object to seeing this on my screen:
The Meesh is Back!
And a webcam chat with this lovely lass. She’d been dormant for a good few months, and I figured the Rockies had claimed her forever. She looks to be coming back online, and forced me to promise not to link her until she gets “some deep metaphors” and such up on her blog.
Not a bad night, is what I’m trying to say. (And I'll think you'll agree that she looks better in my bikini that I do, which is sad, really.)