pantsfarm

Over the last few weeks me and this guy Josh have been trying to get a regular movie night rolling. So far it’s been moderately successful in part due to switching up our movie selections from very narrow appeal (Antichrist -> A Prophet [really good, by the way]) and in part because I have the use of my parent’s sweet apartment in which there is a very nice home theater set up with a huge screen and such.

Through hosting these movies, I’ve come to meet a whole bunch of new people in Beijing. It’s generally nice to meet new people in Beijing because over time I’ve come to notice that I lose friends pretty fast in this town. There’s no underlying drama or anything like that, only that it seems most people who I meet here are not long for Beijing, arriving and departing within the space of a year. If I’m lucky I’ll meet them early in that period and overlap with most of it. Mostly though I catch people in the middle and occasionally the end of their stays, their visits, their semesters, their job search.

So with the constant turn over in people there is a constant weakening if not breaking of those weak ties which I seem to have amassed so many of.

I wonder who I’ve known the longest here in Beijing. I guess there are a few people who I met very early on in my stay here, some even before I had even moved here, but who I don’t actually keep in touch with at all (for example, Ed I met at a dinner my parents hosted before I lived in Beijing. We never really spent much time hanging out or anything and at this point we’ll say hi when we run into one another but I feel like that’s happened less and less often as our mutual friends have drifted out of Beijing as well). But who is there who I actually keep up with regularly that I met here? I can think of maybe one or two people at most. Everybody else got here a lot later or already left.

I guess in a lot of ways that’s reflected in the notion that nearly three years is a long time to have been here to most people who hear it. There are of course the old timers, the old China hands who have been bouncing around Beijing for the better part of the last decade (my parents for example) but I don’t have all that much exposure to them. Mostly they seem to be a bit older than me, too, which has slowed my falling in with them socially.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, so I’ll cut myself short here and think on this some more.