When I was a kid, I had scads of friends, and we all lived fairly close together. I was always off at someone else's house, or someone was at mine. At the time, I couldn't really understand how my parents didn't function in much the same way. They had an extremely small circle of friends, and rarely, it seemed to me, did they have much in the way of a social life.
Looking back, they were a lot more outgoing than I am now. While it was pretty much the same three or four people on the roster every weekend, there were people around. At the same time, I was a lot more social in second grade than the Young Prince is.
I wonder what happened?
Part of it is me. One of the most freeing things I've done in months was to close out the old year by hacking my blog reader back and ditching feeds to several blogs I realized only served to raise my blood pressure and get me all fired up and righteously indignant. Tell you what, I haven't missed the breathtakingly ignorant alternative viewpoints nor the insipid "inspirational" stories one bit. I hid a lot of people on Facebook. I have pretty much given Twitter up for dead at this point as I find I don't have much to say and I don't care at all what some casual acquaintance had for lunch, snack, appetizer or dinner, unless they have found a way to make such posts amusing or at least informative to my existence, like, "Do NOT eat at Joe's unless you want to spend the next 5 hours barfing." I realize being anti-social sort of defeats the point of social media, but I find myself much less irritated all around having taken these steps.
The thing is, that Virtual Reality attitude is extending to Actual Reality as well. Or maybe it started there, I've lost track. But these days I am much happier spending the weekend sprawled on our couch knitting or reading or watching movies than I am at the prospect of getting up, putting on clothes that have actual waistbands, and going out somewhere to talk to people. I still have Christmas gifts I haven't managed to deliver to the family who lives two houses over. And worse, I don't feel completely guilt-ridden and torn up about this. I know the way to get people to come to my house is to go to theirs and extend the invitation, but ... well, I'm sure that would be a fine thing, if I were at all inclined to put on my shoes. Which I'm not. Let them put theirs on and come here!
Part of this is geography, I know. I spend 90 percent of my waking hours 40 miles from my house, and even if WorkFriends were inclined to hang out with us in off hours, it is rather a long haul to meet up. Conversely, I almost never see any of my neighbors (especially in winter, when there is no commonality of yard work to get us all out and waving to each other,) so the chances to really connect and become Every Weekend Friends are few and far between. The YP's friends all live several miles away, and not the sort of miles that can be traversed by bicycle.
So it is always surprising to me when we wind up with weekends full of outings and people and what-all. This weekend the family wound up with four -- count 'em, four -- different Plans With Friends. The YP had a party on Saturday and is going to hang with a classmate today. Friends of ours are moving up from New Orleans and were in town this weekend, and they were over for dinner last night. A woman I used to work with who lives even farther in the boonies than we do stopped by this morning with her family for breakfast and a hand-me-down-kid-clothing swap.
And it was all quite lovely and enjoyable. Completely wonderful, "wow, we should do that more often" kind of nice. So why don't we?
I remember having the same sort of relationship with Chinese food when I was in college. I'd be sitting in the dorm and someone would say, "Let's go to Chinatown and eat at Hop Li's!" And I'd think, "ohhh, god. I'd have to find pants. And then hike to the parking structure. We have to drive there -- at dinnertime, in LA -- and THEN we have to find parking. And ... ehhhhh." But then, every time I actually got up, got dressed, went and did it, by the middle of the meal I couldn't understand why I didn't do this every single night of the week. That food was beyond compare! And the service was amazing! And it was completely reasonably priced!
I have yet to figure out what the problem is. Lack of energy? Lack of motivation? An object at rest and all that? Maybe I'm like my parents and have an equally small social circle, but the diaspora covers a larger geographical area?
I don't know. I'm trying to figure it out. I guess I should try harder to work on that?
Well, maybe. I've got an awfully big backlog on Netflix Instant View to get through.
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