This could be apocryphal, but I remember my father saying to me one day when I was in high school not to enjoy it for a lot of the normal reasons that are bandied about, but because it's one of the easiest times to meet new people and become friends with them. As he put it (possibly fictitiously, though it sounds good, so here's to you, Dad), it's all like a funnel after that. Of course, like many things that my parents and other elders said to me when I was younger, I am finally grasping that. But some things you just gotta learn.
I think about this because of the difficulty with making new friends. It's not that there aren't a lot of other good people out there. There certainly are, and some of us are better at letting them in than others for sure, but it's not just that. It's not just that I have slightly introverted tendencies on occasion. It's that I have to take my own life, with all of its scheduled activities and set aside sufficient time to sate my desires for whatever time I need, and then I have to fit that with one other person's schedule; now try that with a couple you just met that you think would be cool to hang out with. Or do it with 4 or 5 of your current friends, even the ones you're pretty close with. With some exceptions, it's difficult to even get two peoples' schedules, and this doesn't even exclude married people, as I sometimes wonder when some married people I know see each other.
Let's take an mostly real example w/ some changed names because I haven't asked anyone whether I could write about them in this context, and that's just impolite otherwise. Let's say I just met Julia at a friend's party, and we have some things in common, so we exchange digits or look each other up on Facebook and say, sure, we should get together and play some games sometime. Factor in that Julia has a spouse and that Brad, the person who organized, would like to get together for whatever we do, and Brad's spouse as well. Thank god I don't have a spouse right now, it makes all this fictional planning easier. So now we've gotta take 5 peoples' time and figure out how to make it work. Throw in that I work a lot of overtime and a couple people frequently work late, I've gotta come from Saint Paul, someone's in Minneapolis, and someone else is in the western burbs, and as you can see, what we've got here is a colossal clusterfuck.
So what does that mean? Does that mean I hide in my living room, throw my hands up in the air, and give up? Some nights. I have been a bit removed from finding people to go get 10 after 10 at the Herk for a while now, and frankly, I couldn't manage that quite like I once did. I'm forced to concede that my father had a point. But is that tantamount to surrender? Sure, it feels harder to get people to stick to plans now than it did ten years ago, and that's what I'd blame all this modern technology for. It's too easy to reschedule now, and too easy to overbook our own schedules knowing that rescheduling is just a button away on our phone, or a few short key strokes even. Instead of making plans and sticking to them, people are gradually holding out for the next best thing, always checking to see if that offer is coming in via text or e-mail or whatever. I'm sure if we could have done it efficiently with smoke signals, we would have. But you don't have to be there when you can just call and say you'll be late and more than you have to expect anyone to be on time as they go from one overstuffed day to the next. I've read a lot recently about what the proliferation of technology has done to our inability to focus on tasks, but I've only tangentially seen in the articles what it does to our relationships. And frankly, that's what bothers me more. It's the feeling that when I'm talking with someone, a good friend even, I do not have their full attention. And that feeling can't be helping us have more "friends", no matter how many people are in our phones and on our Facebook pages. People used to have to plan ahead, they used to have to wait to get the box scores in the morning, and they used to have to pay attention. These skills have been replaced by our phones, which gives us reminders as to when we need to be somewhere, or scores, or even lets us simply record that which we truly need to understand thoroughly for later in a small capacity.
So I continue to meet new people, and we continue to exchange numbers and e-mails until we've passively let each other into our lives and we can say what is on our minds based on the platitudes we choose to share with 400 others, or 136 in my case. While it's easier than ever to reach out to the people in our lives that do matter, it doesn't necessarily increase our communication with them. We continue to say things and hope that people continue to listen. At which point, I must admit that the entire idea of a blog is not much better in that regard. I am passively seeking an audience, putting something out there and hoping it finds people, whereas before I didn't have that option, but this, technically speaking, could reach anyone. It could reach someone in Sao Paulo or Nagasaki or Perth for all I know. But I don't do a good job of making sure it reaches anyone. Nor do I do an especially great job of following through on a lot of things. It's a lot of energy to constantly try to make plans that fall through, even if it's just an e-mail away, it's a lot of juggling, and there's always another game to play or book to read when I don't want to deal with the energy required by modern life.
None of this stops me from feeling disconnected with all the people around me. Even as I've tried harder to let people in, I find it harder. Hell, I can't even get my parents to call me back, let alone friends. And I know we're all busy. I don't know if we lost the ability to prioritize in this strange, fractured world we live in. But I do feel like we've lost the ability to make time. After all, there's always another show to go to, another article to read online, another funny link to pass on, another structured activity that makes it impossible to do this and that around it.
But what do I do? I keep trying to focus. I keep throwing the e-mails out there. I keep making the phone calls. I keep hoping this won't be the time I'm blown off because it was a long day. And yet I keep making plans precisely because I know people aren't going to answer the e-mails or return the phone calls, and I can tell just as assuredly as I will continue to overfill my time, so will others. So I guess the first solution is to stop that. I don't like being double booked when the airline does it to me, so why should my friends enjoy it when I do it to them. The next step is not getting stressed about those sorts of things. Sure, there are a lot of things going on June 19th. But I made plans, and I damn well intend to enjoy them, and Tame Impala be damned. It's just a show, and more will come along like it, but it's more infrequent that the good friends come around as I get older. And if manipulating enough schedules just to get half a dozen of us together without some specific reason other than my volition isn't enough reason to celebrate, then I don't know what cause is.
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