On old friends, groups of friends, and the work I do

Jackie and Jason drove up from LA this past weekend for book club. It was our first book club meeting in several months — I think our last one was in June at Lisa’s house — and since our book club has been a bit fragmented all this summer, it was the first time I’d seen Jason since May or even earlier. Jackie we’d last seen at the beginning of July, which is still almost three months ago. So it was a very happy reunion.

I was so glad to see them, and have missed them so much, I kept saying jokingly that we have no friends here. Now that is not true at all. But as I kept thinking about my jesting statement, and thinking about the friends we do have in the Bay Area, I realized there are big differences in the way we hung out with friends in LA and the way we hang out with people here. For one thing, most of our Bay Area friends don’t live in the East Bay. Shra, Dana, Wei-Ling, and most of our high school crew are in the South Bay, and Patrick and Bitta are on the Peninsula, so that’s an hour-plus drive away for all; Melissa and Andy are in the city, which might as well be an hour away for all the traffic and trouble with public transportation; Elbert is half an hour away in San Rafael. So distance is a big consideration. Another important factor, which probably trumps even distance, is work. Every single one of our Bay Area friends has a job that takes up the M-F 9-5 at least, except for Bright; most of them work even longer hours. In contrast, very few of our LA friends are employed in that way: most of them are students, or have otherwise flexible schedules. So, whereas in LA we could really “hang out” regularly and on a moment’s notice, in our new life it’s pretty much necessary to schedule get-togethers in advance, sometimes weeks in advance. In this sense, it’s true when I say we have no friends here, in that there’s no one here with whom we can hang out in the way we did with Jackie and Jason (and others) in LA.

I thought about this some more, this morning, because I found myself still missing our friends terribly. We pretty much spent our weekend together sitting around, talking, and eating, which is what we always did in LA as well. It really is true: we don’t do that anymore, not with any kind of group. The only two friends we now see with any regularity are Bright and Caroline, with whom we certainly do feel comfortable just hanging out, but they don’t know each other very well (yet!), so it’s not the same group dynamic. With everyone else, our meetings are so infrequent, it’s impossible to hang out in the same way because there always has to be catch-up first. Even though we hadn’t seen Jason or Jackie in a long time, I talk to Jackie several times a week, and sometimes our other LA friends, and we all keep each other informed about the others, so the catch-up isn’t as distant once we’re all together again. I had not thought about this before, but there really is a big difference between having a group of friends, and having individual friends here and there. The individual friends are a network; the group is family. Jackie has been family for nearly two decades now; Jason became family when we lived as neighbors (more like housemates, really) in LA, and our other LA friends also became family by extension, a relationship cemented by so many Friday night dinners and book club meetings. We don’t have anything like that here — though we are trying to set it up, a difficult task because of the distance and scheduling factors aforementioned — and I had not realized how much I missed it.

The last thing that struck me in thinking about all this is that it’s not just that we have no friend-family here, but that in a bizarre way our own lives have become consumed by work. Erik and I both work from home, on projects of our own choice and devising, which is absolutely as fulfilling and fun as it sounds. After doing this for months now, we’ve figured out how to work alone together and still get lots of real together time — which, believe me, is quite a bit harder than you’d think, even for such natural companions as we are — and we’ve learned how to keep our work from taking over our entire lives. But the trouble is, I’ve now realized, when your work is what you do for fun, it’s very easy to spend all your mental space on work stuff even when you’re not actually working. I may be speaking only for myself here, and not for Erik; I think it’s worse for me, because my work comprises so many activities that I once considered hobbies, and is so tied up with my entire person (remember my New Year’s Resolution?), that in a very real way I never get away from either my work or myself. I think the only thing I do now that has absolutely no tie to my work in any way is my singing lessons, and even so, that’s still all about me. Being around new friends, or friends I haven’t seen in a while, is still (unfortunately) about me because I kind of watch myself around them: so long as one can’t say or do anything in front of someone, one is still thinking of oneself. So, paradoxically, precisely because I can be so utterly myself around our old friends, being around them this weekend really allowed me to stop thinking of myself, and just be whatever, and that’s another thing I hadn’t realized I’d missed.

A thought: It’s kind of funny, because Jackie and Jason inspired this whole entry, but neither of them read this blog.