Before I get into this too much, let it be known that I am an incredibly social person….in REAL LIFE TOO.
I’m not one of those online entities that rolls up into a little ball upon face-to-face interaction…I actually like people. I have friends!
In fact, this is the year that my very best friend and I will offically have been friends longer than we haven’t….did that make sense? We’ve known each other longer than we haven’t in our total lifespan.
I have friends from three high schools I attended…middle school even!…friends from my single-wild-and-crazy days…most of my ex-roommates…even a few ex-boyfriends…I have mommy-friends AND daddy-friends…friends from the cancer world…I’m almost a better friend to Peter’s friends than HE is…blogger friends…I have LOTS of freaking friends! <—dude. ego much?
But the whole point of expressing how well-adjusted *snort* I am is to say this:
I have this strange non-urgency about making any more friends here in teh GEORGIA.
Ten years ago Peter and I and a wee bebe Nathaniel picked up our meager possessions and moved cross country from Florida to Colorado. It was traumatic. We had one car (that Pete took off to work every day), a tiny apartment (that he seemingly never came home to because he was off enjoying his new job where they had grown-up conversations and played foozeball tournaments on Fridays) and a new baby (who was staggeringly cute, but not so much a great conversationalist at that point).
There may or may not have been some curling-up-on-the-closet-floor type weeping bouts…followed by those wonderful, loving conversations that involve the words “I” “hate” and “you” and the gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes.
I was desperate.
Desperate for people to talk to, women to connect with, someone to be a friend to me.
And I met a group of the ugliest, mean-spirited, back-stabbing gaggle of wretches to climb out of the rotting crypt of girlfriendhood and waved my arms and screamed “OOOH MEEE!!! Pick MEEEE!!!”
It took a few months before I backed off and gave them the stink eye, letting them know in no uncertain terms that I thought they were totally and utterly C.R.A.Z.Y. Which I might have said in THOSE exact words, directly to their faces.
Did I mention these were all the wives of the guys Pete worked with?
Yeah. Good times. Corporate Wife FAIL.
They made me appreciate the art of not having to have someone in your back pocket all the time.
I’ve made tons of acquaintances over the years, people who I enjoyed for the time we were together…but I’ve made some tremendous friends that I’ll hold onto forever….friends that are like the Louises to my Thelma, Ethels to my Lucy, the Daytime Emmy Awards to my Susan Lucci and my own personal brand of Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Sisters of my heart.
And thanks to the wonderful world of the interwebs, I have them….all day, every day, five thousand times a day in forty-nine flavors! Calls, texts, emails, IM’s, Skype, Google Groups, twitter, facebook, carrier-freaking-pigeons…I am NEVER alone.
I like it.
I’m good with the fact that I don’t have to see my people all the time for them to still be my best people.
So, it’s been three weeks here and I haven’t even tried to make more than mildly pleasant small talk with anyone I’ve met. I barely make eye contact with the kid who hands me my Starbucks…I just can’t…it would feel too much like I’m cheating on Jim back at the Brandon Starbucks…I MISS YOU, JIM!
And I wonder if when I start meeting people I’ll even be interested in taking the time to get to know anyone. Will it feel worth it to start weeding through to those particular people I’ll actually connect with? I don’t even feel like I have the time, energy or motivation to go through another Colorado fiasco. Am I officially just too damn lazy to make friends? Or is there a point where your dance card is full and it’s OK to feel complete in the ones you have?
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Oh, and on a totally different note, I’m also over at Deep South Moms today, irconically enough, writing about my newbie expectations of BlogHer09 and how I’ll be meeting lots of new people.