pantsfarm

In the process of reading a few blogs of people I don’t know, I’ve come across more than one instance of people writing friend inventories. A couple things I noticed in the course of all this reading about other people’s lives:

1. The kind of person who does this sort of thing seems to usually be a person with few friends.
2. Definitions of what a “friend” is vary a lot.

Depending a lot on how I decide to answer #2 I either fall into our out of the category of people with few friends and presumably having that as a reason to be bummed.

When I drop the phrase “friend inventory” into Google, the first result I get is some career-oriented blog which puts forward the following conditions for close friends:

• You have been friends with the person when you were not professionally involved with the person.
• The person knows the part of yourself you dislike the most.
• The person returns your calls in 48 hours.

Other conditions for friendship that get tossed around things like

1. somebody I’d tell my secrets to (and vice versa)
2. somebody who I could count on to get my back
3. somebody I’d be comfortable calling up and asking for them to float me a grand
4. somebody I’d call if I needed a lift to the hospital
5. somebody I talk to frequently and regularly for hours
6. somebody who’s wedding I’d attend or would invite to my own
7. somebody who I would ask if I needed a place to crash

I’m not sure what metric I will use when considering who I consider my friends these days though. I do however automatically exclude family from this list. Certainly there’s a bunch of family members who would pass easily these various arbitrary requirements

Starting with the 3 given conditions for “close” friends, I don’t think I would fare so well. I’m not sure what anybody would say if I asked them what they thought I most disliked about myself but I’m pretty sure that if anybody could get it right, it’d be be a lucky guess. I’m not even sure how I would answer that about myself and I’m not the kind of person who has really talked so much about my insecurities to anybody. I’m sure I’ll have slipped some small comment in while talking to many different friends but probably not the same tidbit to everybody. It’s good to tell people things, I just spread it out over lots of different people.

On the other hand, a great many of the people I know will get back to me in under 48 hours and I’ve never been very good at making friends through work. I think the latter part has a lot to do with the fact that all my real jobs have been in foreign countries where I am in the tiny minority of foreigner, native English speakers.

As for the other conditions, some of them seem much more applicable to me than others. The first, for example, doesn’t seem as relevant because I don’t feel as though I share that many secrets. That’s not to say there aren’t thing I share with some people and not with others, but… well, maybe I do have secrets. I feel like the secrets I do share are in some sense governed by which sphere of my life I know a person from. It’s not that it’s a secret that I try to keep, so much as it is some shared knowledge that I share only because of how or when I met that person and so it rarely if ever comes out anywhere else.

Enough consideration of conditions of friendship, I want to get to inventorying. I’m going to go through this from memory and chronologically.

Grades K - 6

There are… two people, Alex and Anthony, who I still talk to in this category but one of them I find myself talking to much less than the other and I’m not really sure why that is. I think it has a lot to do with my location and the amount of hours of overlap we have. For whatever reason, I catch Anthony on IM much more often and for that we seem to have stayed in better touch. This is a pretty weak excuse though and I think I’m going to try and do better in keeping up with Alex. That said, I wouldn’t hesitate to ask these guys if I could crash with them and whenever I’m in the same town I make a point of looking them up. In fact, I’d probably count them by all of those numbered conditions, with the possible exception of talking to frequently and regularly for Alex, but I already talked about that.

Grades 7-8

I’ve separated middle school because these were years I spent going to a charter school instead of my local public school. Geddes and Ani I’ve kept up with a lot. I think for both of them I’ve had a particularly strong friendship on account of having spent time living with both of them on separate occasions while abroad. I’ve gone out with Ani in at least 3 different countries, 2 for Geddes. I imagine that if anybody were to ask me my thoughts on having gone to Parker for these two years of my life, I’d be able to say that the best thing I took out of it were the friends I met there. Nobody does though, because who talks about middle school? There are a bunch of other people I met in Middle school and I’m Facebook friends with a heap of them but I’ve lost touch with nearly all of them. Occasionally somebody will pop up but none have been so persistent. The one special case from the Parker years is Nathan, who did invite me to his wedding and I nearly booked a flight to attend but ultimately decided not to make the trip from China back to the US. We’d already drifted a lot at that point and now I think even more so.

LPC, as a camper.

Simultaneously, at least with a resolution of years, I went to Summer camps through middle school where I met a lot of cool people. I kept in touch with them for a few years after, and later as Facebook swept the globe, I became internet-friends with a bunch of them. Unfortunately that’s about as far as it went.

High School (9-11)

I returned from Parker with a fresher set of eyes and a bunch of people who I never really knew at all before became friends. Now many years on I don’t keep in good touch with most if not all of them. This group is characterized by occasional Facebook birthday wishes and me keeping track of at least where in the world everybody is these days. Stacey showed up in Beijing for a while, for example, and while she was here we hung out a bit, but then she left and my staying in touch has dwindled to the same nonexistent level as before. Here again though there is one notable exception. Jerry and I basically met in high school, although we weren’t really friends then, we both ended up going to college in Illinois and largely due to the Internet we got to be better friends. Earlier this year I attended his wedding, sadly as only one of a few representatives of Jerry’s life before Illinois, which I hardly count as myself.

Summer @ Harvard

I met a lot of cool people, and kept in touch with none of them. I retained almost nothing from the courses I took, however, I did learn a lot outside of school, and still have fond memories of playing frisbee with the now-zillionare and then self-declared asshole Mark Zuckerberg.

College

Of course I met lots and lots of people. I still keep in touch with a lot of them through occasional written letters, IM chats, and emails. Now that Skype seems to be a household name among my peer group, I’m even speaking with some of them in spite of the timezone differences. Some old roommates are definitely among the stronger ties from Chicago: Mike, Ben, Cassie, Kim, Jesse. I’m not sure why I never really kept up with Juan. I practically lost touch with him while still in Chicago as soon as we were no longer roommates. Other people I met through the housing system placing them on my floor such as James, Adrianne, Annie are the most frequently kept up with of them I think. To a lesser extent, there’s Viv, Pete, Alex and Jess who I am in touch with too though a bit more intermittently. I don’t think I made a lot of lasting friends through classes. Lots of Facebook friends but not really people I’d make a point of meeting up with if I was traveling and nearby. There were some people I met through clubs though, mostly Doc, such as Kate and Yana. I try to keep in touch with Kate because she still seems like she’s doing way more interesting things than I am, and recently while spending time researching (playing) some Facebook games for work, I got back in touch with Yana who I’ve discovered is now in the same hemisphere as me. That’s not to say I’m in better contact as a result, only that if I ever decide to visit Cambodia I probably would look her up. I feel like I’ve forgotten somebody who I have been in touch with recently but oh well.

LPC, as a counselor

I went back to LPC, as a counselor, and though it remains to be seen if these friendships will fare better over time than those from being a camper, they do currently benefit from being much more recent. I still chat with Tobi from time to time, and occasionally fire emails to Robert. If I were going to be visiting SoCal I’d probably try and get in touch with Hannah but I feel that’s already drifted too much.

China

This period I think is possibly overrepresented among my Facebook friends, due only to the fact that by the time I met everybody here, Facebook was quite widespread. There are a few people who no longer live in the same city as I do but I would still try to look up and say hello to if I was in the same city. Aaron, Wong, Dan, Jonmichael, and Greg. But among the people I know now who are currently in Beijing and I actually see fairly often (meaning more than once a month), I am not sure who I’d say are my close friends. Sarah is certainly among my better friends in Beijing though.

There are a lot of people here I’m not going to enumerate who I would invite to a party, for example, but I’m not really sure how much I would consider them close friends. A lot of people I am friends with here are, for lack of a better term, friends of convenience. More on this later.

Others

There are other people who I keep in touch with but didn’t meet in normal circumstances. Katt I have never actually met but while I was in college I talked with kind of a lot. Well, not a lot, but, she was somebody totally outside of my in-person social circles and so I talked about things I wouldn’t have talked about with anybody else. Miranda now I exchange emails with more often than anybody else but I have a much tougher time imagining myself just hanging out with. This is very much for me a penpal situation. Another weird case is Zack who I’ve technically known since I was 1, as our parents are good friends, and for the first half of my life, we’d always go to each other’s birthday parties. Through high school we drifted a bit, and then during and after college we met up a couple times, only whenever I was in New York. Since coming to China though I’ve pretty much lost touch.

Friends of convenience vs. the other kind of friend.

The last time I was in the US, I was getting driven by my aunt to the airport to catch a flight to Austin for Jerry’s wedding. During the ride, we talked about a lot of things, but one thing that stands out in my memory is some remarks she made about two different kinds of friend. There are friends of convenience and then there’s another kind. For the most part, everybody starts out as a friend of convenience, because you meet people who it’s convenient to. After a while though, things change and some people drift away, some faster than others. The ones who don’t, or who do so much more slowly, they’ve become the other kind of friend.

I don’t feel like I can really say if somebody is more than a friend of convenience until the friendship is tested by somebody moving away and so it’s hard for me to say much about the people I know now in Beijing. I imagine somebody will be upset at being considered a friend of convenience but too bad.