how to make blechs and influence gah.

Dear People-I-Kinda-Know,

I was gchatting with Alex yesterday morning, and she told me that she was having lunch with Rita. This got me thinking about lunch, and how I spend too much money buying it all the time. Then I started thinking about how, when I first started my job, I always brought my lunch from home. As soon as I made friends at work, though, I started eating out constantly and hemorrhaging $$$. Then I realized that Rita had solved my problem the day before, when she said (also on gchat): "ok, well, the best way [to save money] is to stop having friends. life is really cheap then." So true, Gremlin! Movies, dinners, bar tabs - that shit adds up.

And then I read this article, about how basically loneliness is just a state of mind, and I thought that, being naturally introverted in the first place, I could maybe get rid of my friends and pull it off. (As a bonus, that article also reminded of another article, which is one of my favorites ever.) I could still be friends with you guys, though, since none of you live in New York and therefore demand only cursory financial investment. Gchat is free, after all.

But man is a social animal and all that, so the long-term feasibility of this plan is probably suspect. I've heard, though, over and over again, how hard it is to make friends as an adult, so it's possible that I may end up friendless without trying. I can't decide whether it is actually harder to make friends in the "real world," though. I don't know how you guys feel about post-college life, but I've made a fair number of friends since graduation. But I've never thought making friends was a piece of cake, so my standards are probably too low. Making friends, keeping friends - who said that shit was easy?

Some people don't even try very hard; I've known lots of people (male and female, in high school and in college) who would ditch their friends as soon as they started dating someone, and this kind of behavior always befuddled me. Aside from the fact that I was usually the person getting ditched, I never understood why anyone would go through all the trouble of making friends, just to shrug them off. The person you're dating may be perfect, but doesn't everyone need a break from perfection now and again? I mean, what happens if you break up with this new girlfriend/boyfriend? You can't be friends with their friends anymore, and your old friends hopefully have enough self-respect to be angry with you, so you've got to dig up a whole new set of buddies. It just doesn't seem worth it. The other kind of behavior I never understood was people who have a million acquaintances (and 900 facebook friends) but no actual close friends. If you can have drinks with 200 people, but can call none of them when you're locked out of your apartment in your underwear, what is the point?

These strange behaviors don't seem to be gendered, as far as my experience goes, and contrary to popular opinion, I'm pretty sure there are an equal number of friendless men as there are women. It's true, though, that I've lost touch with more male friends, percentage-wise, than I have with female friends. The reasons for this have varied from bitter betrayal to general laziness, so I don't have any coherent theory about why this is the case. (I could speculate about the needs of the male psyche, but that would probably be pointless and painful, so I'll skip it.) Maybe if we pool experiences, a pattern will emerge. I certainly don't agree with the When Harry Met Sally adage, that men and women can never be friends because of the sexual tension. First of all, gay men are still men in my book, and second of all, I have definitely had sexual-tensionless male friends (but, admittedly, this is a rare thing). For whatever reason, though, all of my close long-term friends are women, and I imagine this will continue to be true for the rest of my life.

I subscribe, generally, to the less-is-more theory of friendship, which is convenient considering how rarely I make new friends. But I moved around as a kid, and since it has never been easy for me to make friends, I learned fairly young what it feels like to be without any. The feeling never lasted too long, but it happened often enough that I ended up being more concerned with having a few good friends than having lots of so-so friends. Other people, like my sister, had the opposite reaction; she learned how easy it was for her to make friends each time we moved, and has since then subscribed to the bigger-is-better theory of friendship. I have yet to determine which theory works better in practice, but to each her own, I guess.

Love, and sunshine, and puppies,
Julia