Saturday night was the main event. I was finally able to attend a party with some college friends courtesy of Jeff and Sara Jane. I won’t bore you with the details, the important thing is that I got to talk to some people I haven’t interacted with in a long time. It was great to talk to people like Joe and Ali, and see that they are doing well. And of course there was plenty of reason to drink alcohol and eat chocolate, which makes for a very pleasant evening of loudly regaling tales of stupidity from yesteryear.
I miss a lot of people from my past. Life changes, and people drift in and out. While regret shouldn’t become such a big part of your life, it often does. I keep saying that I will make a better effort at keeping in touch with friends, but, quite frankly, I’m lousy at it. It’s not intentional, and I apologize to anyone who was offended by my progressive lifestyle… I’m not sure what that was supposed to mean. My life isn’t that busy, but I get easily distracted by my job, my girlfriend, and shiny plastic discs. In reality, I’m jealous of the fact that Lisa still talks to friends who knew her in third grade, when 8 years is a ridiculously long time for me to know anyone outside my family at this point. And those people who have known me for the better part of a decade are only occasional acquaintances these days.
I think for my non-New Year’s resolution (why wait for a specific date to start working on your life?), I’m going to try to e-mail as many people that I’ve been meaning to say hi to as possible. College friends, bar buddies, musical companions, etc. I’ve known a lot of people in my life, and it’s nice to keep in touch with more than a passing encounter.
Yeah. I’m the same way. Sometimes I put the effort in to keep in touch, sometimes I don’t. Usually I don’t. It doesn’t help that I hate to talk on the phone.
Anyway, I did the whole “send email to people I haven’t spoken to in forever” thing one year, and it was really cool, really worth doing. Maybe I’ll do that again this year.
For starters, I was disappointed that you didn’t make it on Saturday. I know you were only a maybe, but almost everyone else I was looking forward to seeing made it, so you would have made it a clean sweep.
But it brings me great joy to hear someone else (in particular a woman) say that they don’t like to talk on the phone. Lisa talks on the phone a lot, and she hated that I could be so awkward on it when we first started dating. Recently we’ve talked about this and I even explained to her that there have only been maybe two people who I could speak with for relatively long times on the phone, and one of those is my mother. I’m not good at it, and it feels weird and stilted. If I concentrated more on e-mail and other electronic forms as supplements for these relationships, I really think I’d do better. So it’s worth a try.
Although I have to add that one of my best old friendship moments was a random phone call from a close high school buddy. We hadn’t spoken in at least a year, when suddenly he calls my cell phone while I’ll checking out Lisa’s last apartment for the first time. It was out of the blue, and went no where, but it was contact. He was waiting for his wife, who went into a store, and killed time by calling me up and asking me how I was doing. That’s awesome.