Dig Dug

Today at 7:12 pm: Singing along to Rent, not exactly headed toward Santa Fe.

The thing that seems so daunting about life nowadays is how hard it is to create a social circle. All throughout childhood and college you're presented with situations where nearly everyone around you is experiencing the same stage of life you are. Finding friends is just a matter of making choices and selecting whether you prefer chocolate, hard candy, or something different altogether. This isn't to say that finding friends post college is impossible since everyone does it but it seems much more fragmented. You're likely to have at least triple the circles you'd have normally, each one not very likely to intersect.

Most of it is probably proximity and the nature of the adult life. When you don't share a city or a campus anymore, activities and the people involved in those activities can't readily cross over. Plus, your own life is separated out, usually into work and non-work life. That alone is a serious line of demarcation for most people.

In the most recent friendship circle experience I'm having, it's been remarkable how fast and slow it all seems. For example, it seems very fast how quickly you can suddenly be doing things with the same people over and over again, to the point where seeing them every day feels natural. Your old social habits and circles seem like last season's outfit.

But then to think about how long this process of feeling comfortable, of being able to just walk into someone's house at any time of the day, without feeling the need to schedule, plan, or panic, is very, for lack of better word, depressing. Even when things are set up rather perfectly for full on friendship, it can still take months to actually reach this comfortable plateau.

I mean, for the past few months we've been hanging out a ton with Jennifer, Janice, Micah and all of their assorted friends. James and I have participated in dinners, playground park visits, beach days, trips to LA, clubbing nights, and various birthdays and important life moments with them over this span. And in some ways it all still feels very new and slow to coalesce.

This is despite the fact that Jennifer, Janice and I were already friends for many years, and their friends and my friends have the mindset of already liking and opening themselves up to each other. Plus everyone's been very available and willing to hang out due to our lack of time constraints and general quiet time in our involvement with other life activities. With all these natural advantages built into the situation, it still took three to six months to "bake."

Now think about how that would work if you lived elsewhere and were either trying to create a new social circle or to plug yourself into an existing one. Conceivably it could take years. That seems so long to me. How many awkward silences and weird moments would you have to endure before you could feel entirely comfortable?

Sometimes the math of friendship is just intimidating.

We drove out to the desert early evening in hopes of catching the sunset. While the actual watching of the sunset didn't work out too well, the night did. Jennifer was on a mission to build a fire and while some of us (okay mostly me) had some concerns about the legality and safety of a fire in the brushy "desert", it all worked out and the fire was wonderful. As was hanging out with headlamps, which were acquired by the Carvajals at the swap meet. Seriously, if you could walk around all the time with handlamps life would be so much better. And um, brighter.

"Make new friends, but keep the old
One is silver and the other's gold
You have a hand, and I have another
Put them together and we have each other
A circle is round, it has no end
That's how long I want to be your friend"
-Girl Scout song-