Posts tagged: Friends

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MAY 10TH, 2007
By RYAN

Broken Promises for Broken Hearts

For the second time in five months, I’ve given up on those with whom I have the longest relationships (save for one). It’s fair to say that I don’t really consider myself an adult. There’s that certain quality which is evident in people’s parents, and I do not (yet?) exhibit it. My personality is still in flux, to some degree. Perhaps that’s what I’m seeing in them, yet not in myself. Their lives do not fluctuate. From month to month and year to year, the same events happen with regularity. Family reunions, annual trips to the same places, static social lives (if any to speak of). Those are the hallmarks of an adult. Sure, I have my regular “grown-up” activities (cooking on Tuesdays, for instance), but there’s still an evolution which is observable by others.

There are some things in which I will admit I’m more mature than I’d like to be. I have more personal responsibility than desirable. I have a boring (non-retail) job. I have health insurance which is not provided by my parents. I have a car payment. I have a mortgage payment. These things are irksome, but necessary accouterments of progress. Some of my friends view themselves as Olympians. Not quite right. Even Olympians are anthropomorphic; they have very human flaws. My friends are infallible. Nothing is their fault. No matter how atrabilious their temperament, how rebarbative their behaviour, they are in the right. In the years (and in some cases, decades) for which we’ve been amenable to each other, they are fundamentally the same. Any perception of progress has been swept away in the last few weeks. The rose coloured glasses are off.

It’s perfectly normal to feign happiness in your relationship until such time as you can move your things out while your significant other is at work. After all, I’m not home much for you to talk to, and the 360 is gone, so how are you supposed to handle living there? Feel vindicated by going on a date immediately following your vitriolic tirade towards someone who was wholly undeserving. Corner her and tear her down for daring to mention that she bought you two tickets to Amsterdam for your graduation present. How dare anybody question whether you will actually graduate, though the 25 pages you need to write in 4 days are naught but a fleeting concern in comparison to the lure of a jazz club. Best of all, tell no one. Imperiously demand that she attend your graduation party with bells on so you can maintain the facade of a relationship which you’ve flushed down the drain, though it seems that you may not graduate.

There’s nothing wrong with hypocrisy, either. Go ahead. Berate somebody you profess to love because she caught you in a lie. That’s healthy and normal, isn’t it? Throw a tantrum because I am more aware of her life than you are, though it was primarily your actions which drove her away. Yes, I am more informed than you, but simply because I care about others as much as you profess to. What are the chances that you’d have gone with last night? That you would offer aid should it happen again? Your interaction with me is amensalistic more often than not, and it will not be as onerous as you presume for me to rid myself of that for now. When you had problems, I hit the “stop” button on the playback device of my life. The curtain on the stage of my romantic life dropped, and the thespians have left the theatre. You have purloined my social life, and I want it back. Feel like starting an internecine feud merely because I speak with somebody who does not wish to speak with you? I’m eerily prepared for that. In order to salvage this, ablutions shall be necessary at some point.

What kind of statement does it make when you cannot be trusted to watch a puppy? When you steal away inside to the cavernous maw of your video-game sanctuary rather than subject yourself to a scintillating conversation about pay scales in IT (and the reasons why academia does not attract the right candidates), the highlights of Civil War battlefields of the Army of Northern Virginia, and battles of antiquity in the Mediterranean basin? Ok. Admittedly those are interesting to me, and to the people I was speaking with, but not you. It’s not as if I said “Hi. How are you? When’s the last time you visited Antietam?” They are your roommate’s in-laws. Make the conversation what you will, interject with a new subject, or just stand around. It’s common courtesy. Apparently you are an uncommon man, and not in a complimentary way. You are supposed to be the best man at his wedding (assuming that does not change, and the one with you was another groomsman). Should she expect you to present a stirring toast? I appreciate that you think it would be funny to drop a lot of subtle video game references and movie quotes. That will certainly convey your sincerity and happiness about his wedlock.

On the upside, there are those who have made something of themselves. People who are going to business school, law school, nursing school. Friends who turned their education into a job which pays very well (and negotiated their way into a rather large signing bonus!). Surrogate siblings who have left their checkered past behind for a marriage, mortgage, and happiness in a career path which they have been on since 18. It is for (and because of) them that I do not pack my things and set out for Phoenix or destinations hitherto unknown. They maintain my sanity here. For the others? It’s high time to start cutting the lashes which bind you to me to leave you adrift in the current for a while. I’ve lost the energy and motivation necessary to pull dead weight through life. Hopefully you can keep up under your own power, and I’ll be ’round when you’re waving, not drowning.

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MAY 3RD, 2007
By RYAN

It’s Strange…

I’ve never seen the point of a diary. Though I’ve never known anybody who actually kept one, recording your thoughts in a journal that nobody is going to see other than you is wasted effort. Without other people to go over your thought process, the chances of you getting any kind of benefit out of it are slim to none. Blogs are different somehow. I like the idea that people can review my reasoning and see a part of me which is rarely exposed to anything other than a pixelated screen or very close friends. I dislike that I can’t see the number of people who’ve viewed my blog here (of course, it’s been about twelve hours since it sprang into existence, but I didn’t see it anywhere in the dashboard), but that’s something which I’ll learn to deal with or code a way around eventually. It’s not at all a pressing issue, and I like the customization options available with CSS in Blogger much better than anything I happened to see on Myspace. Yes, CSS is an utter waste for a single page. XHTML/DHTML could do the job, but then I can’t drag and drop elements (not that I envision that happening). I seem to be digressing.

The last two weeks or so have been dramatic. That’s an egregious understatement. A certain friend of mine has been desperately seeking love for the last… well, decade? Sure, he’s had a few relationships. Each of them has been “the girl he’s going to marry.” Needless to say, it hasn’t quite turned out that way. I find the entire notion of seeking love to be exuding desperation in the worst kind of way. Sure, if you happen to find it, that’s fantastic. I’ve been in love, I think. It’s a a difficult thing to define. The fairy-tale, Shakespearean ideal doesn’t mesh with reality. Love is not enough to maintain a relationship on its own. You have to be a decent human being, you have to have a modicum of compatibility, you need all the other things that make two people click. Everything which is necessary for a lasting friendship should also be there in a long-term relationship. You can’t blindly hope you’ll go the distance just because there happen to be feelings involved. Eventually, those will fade, or they won’t be enough anymore.

If I’m anything, I’m a good friend. I’ll be there for those I care about no matter what how hectic things in my life may be or how ludicrous I find their situation to be. That is what I do. The happiness of those close to me is paramount, and I don’t really understand why. It’s not particularly important. Now, I’m no paragon of wisdom in a relationship, nor of virtue. I’ve been cheated on and stayed. I’ve tried to make a long-distance relationship work against all odds (multiple times). I’ve been drunk for months at a time (when I wasn’t working). I’ve also cheated. I’ve ended long-term relationships for no real reason other than boredom, never looking back as their lives collapsed into the void I left behind. For a while, I really believed that the thrill of the chase was the best part of being in a relationship, and there was no reason to stay once that was over with. All this has, at least, made me a veritable font of advice on what not to do, and how to fix a relationship (as well as when it’s not worth it).

Be that as it may, I will work against all odds to keep them happy. Even if I think it’s a waste of time, I’ll give it a go for as long as it seems feasible. Yeah, it sometimes makes me feel like a fool. That’s the way it goes. I don’t generally get in the middle of things. I’ll give advice from the sidelines and hear them out on whatever their issues may be, but I don’t play mediator. I’m a good ear, or so people tell me. I’m easy to vent to, and I give worthwhile feedback. Sure, it may be difficult to imagine, since I have propensity for speaking, but stranger things have happened. In this case, I got involved. It’s not as if I didn’t already know that they’d been having problems for a long time, but I wasn’t ever worried until recently. Though I didn’t ever see her much, there was a bit of a rapport, so I thought I’d inquire as to the specifics of the situation.

What I heard back was shocking and slightly appalling. I’ve been an observer to a couple of his relationships. They weren’t good ones, by any means, but I had attributed that to unsavory qualities in his exes. I still would. This was different. The more I spoke with her, the clearer things became. As noted, I understand where she’s coming from. I know her situation, her priorities, his problems. However, I was oblivious to the particular circumstances of their relationship. After a short period of time in the beginning, he wanted to tell her that he loved her. I told him it was a mistake; I told him that he’d freak her out, and she’d run (with good reason given the briefness of their involvement). I was right, and he elected not to tell me. As time went on, fights over trivial things began to occur. His obstinate refusal to compromise (or take care of himself in the most basic fashion) ended things more than once. These were not the reasons he told me (in fact, he never gave me reasons). Things came to a head because he didn’t think it was reasonable to sacrifice anything in his life in order to begin one with her. Things got fixed for a little while, but soon collapsed again.

Regardless, the point of this is not to go over his mistakes and where he went wrong. He hasn’t learned anything in years. I find that those I’ve kept in touch with the longest, by in large, are quintessentially the same as they were when I met them. There’s been no rise in maturity, no progress. They have not read a book since high school (sourcebooks do not count). Even then, they did very little other than what was required of them. Their interpersonal relationships are at the level mine were at when I was 19. We have essentially the same conversations we had back then, except we’re talking about new games or movies. It’s tragic. I love those guys to death, I just wonder how much longer we can keep going like this. It says something when the people who enjoy seeing the most are those who I reconnected with in the last year, and it’s not good.

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MAY 2ND, 2007
By RYAN

A Frame of Reference

Well, I’ve made the commitment to blog every day. I’m not sure if I’ll quite live up to that, but it ought to be a lot more regular than merely days when I’m working (which is my Myspace blog). Counter-intuitively, this blog will be the one which deals with me as a person, my happenings, any epiphanies I may have, and similar things rather than the one on the page which is supposed to describe me. Sure, random news and political diatribes are just as defining as speaking at length about the details of my social life (and possibly romantic life), but not in the same way. Given that this will be the first entry in this blog, it’s not a bad idea to go through what’s happening in my life at the moment. It’s not as if I’m likely to forget, but dates and events don’t always line up the way you think they do in a few years time, or even a few months time.

I’ll endeavor not to call people out by name (note: just realized that I’m going out of my way and sounding awkward just to avoid splitting an infinitive, which is not technically grammatically improper in English. Perhaps I should stop making fun of Dan for it), other than whose whom I know I will never offend or say bad things about. That pretty much narrows the list to two (my brother and his wife), given that their children are not old enough to read, nor do I think they’d have any interest in reading my blog at this moment in their lives. Perhaps later, but I hope they live closer then, so they don’t get to know me by reading my blog online. It’s not as if I bitch about my friends constantly, or even with any kind of regularity, but there are times with anybody where they get on your nerves (note: S has not done this, nor has K), or you just need to vent. I’m fairly sure that anybody reading this will already know who it is I’m talking about by inference should it come to that, but I’d rather not do it so obviously. It’s rather tacky. I’ve successfully avoided naming names before, even in very long diatribes, so I’ll aim for that here.

Going through my social circle is fruitless. In many ways, it’s very static. It’s kind of like a high-school reunion every time I see them, though there are a number of post-education additions. Still, the principals of the group haven’t changed in quite a while, and I doubt if they’re going to. Yes, I have a solitary sibling, and he’s my identical twin. Does it feel like I have a brother? I’m not entirely sure. He’s more like my best friend, except he’s been around my entire life. The only person who hears everything. Judging by the sibling dynamic I’ve seen in other families, I’m not at all sure that it’s in the same vein. Twins are something on their own (not that I’ve observed many other twins either). We’ve all found a companionship in each other. A familial bond, and we’ve been there for some of the worst times in each other’s lives. Sure, some event may be so galling that it temporarily (or permanently) expels one of us, but we all know each other quite well at this point, so we have similar moral values and ethics. Yes, there are some things which I think are quite appalling which they don’t agree upon (mostly to do with children and what priority they ought to have in people’s lives), but that’s likely due to living with young children for an extended period of time. It’s something which you just have no perspective on until you live it, and I’d hope that theirs will change similarly should the time come that they become fathers or what have you. Then again, some of us can be very obtuse at times.

So how do I clarify where my life stands right now? I’m not concerned with my employment status as such, since figuring out when you worked which job is very easy given the date. I’ve already noted that I have a fairly static group of friends. My relationship status is in flux, to say the least. An ever-changing menagerie of women, some appealing, some not. There’s nothing I can do to lock that down at the moment, though the description given may well be enough. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve been single for an extended period of time, and it’s kind of refreshing. It’s also true that I love meeting new people, so the dating ritual really suits me. I am, at the moment, a self-described socialist. That may date this, given time, but my political views have changed so gradually over the years that I can’t say what I believed in at any one point. I do recall being a bit of a fascist in high-school, but I can’t imagine why. My Myspace blogs will detail the reasons for my beliefs should I ever be curious, but I really don’t foresee this changing at any point.

My personal philosophy on life is perhaps somewhere between hedonism and nihilism. I have no idea how to describe that particular aspect of me. I don’t really think about it, so it’s hard for me to assign myself to some group which mandates conviction in your beliefs (as both hedonism and nihilism would seem to be). I’m rather apathetic to the whole thing. That’s not entirely true either. There are some things you just can’t change, so why worry about them? I cannot change the actions of others, nor will I ever be able to. I can’t say that I’m always happy about it, but I never let things get to me. Everything rolls off my back, so to speak. The only thing which has affected me in years was the sudden engagement, and the equally sudden end of it.

I read through people’s blogs fairly often if I don’t know them well, and I’d like to. It’s strange how you can see a metamorphosis through time as you go back further. You can watch their though process as they go through trying times, and be privy to the formative events of their life. It’s the kind of thing I’d hope people would be able to get going through what this blog will ideally be, and perhaps that kind of resource even to me. I’ve heard from a lot of people that I changed in the time when I was living in Georgia. I had a very difficult time believing that. People don’t often change. They grow up, maybe, but the core qualities of your persona and the tenets which you live your life by don’t often change after a certain age. I realize now that those people were right, but it took a major event in the life of one of my friends for it to be obvious to me. It’s likely to be the next subject which I write about anyway.

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