Time Spent with Friends in May 2013

I decided to break down how much time I spend with various friends and acquaintances, so I kept a log during the month of May. What surprised me was how little time I spend one-on-one in person with anyone--or at least, how little time I did so in May. One friend barely shows up here, Al. I imagine he'd at least get a couple of hours one-on-one each month most months, but he was bedridden most of May, so we stuck to short phone conversations.

The chart shows time spent with friends in groups (for example, at parties--in fact, mostly at parties), on the phone, and one-on-one face-to-face. Time spent at organized activities I have to attend--namely work or church--are not counted. 

Women in My Life as an Adult

Until about a week ago, I'd never had an official girlfriend--that is, a girl I was seeing exclusively who was also seeing me exclusively, with an eye toward marriage (sometimes I've had an eye on a gal and spent time with her and not had anyone else in my life, but when we finally got to "the talk," I've always learned she just saw me as a friend; likewise, there have been a few times when I had more than one gal in my life, which led to my own inability to be decisive, and I ended up losing out on all the women, usually in quick succession--something that almost happened to me again this past spring). Anyway, I was talking the other day with a rather consistent phone companion over the first half of 2013, and she noted that I probably always had some gal who was a friend who I spent time with to kill the loneliness. I said sometimes, but I didn't think that had been the case with me most of my adult life. Hence, I decided to do a graph to see. Below are women I averaged probably at least an hour with on the phone or in person each week during a particular span of time (these are estimates; it's likely I've undercounted time spent with a few women along the way and they're not showing up, just as I've likely overcounted time spent with a few of these women):

Pretty much, I've only had such "relationships" since graduating from college. Of those, the longest was a strictly platonic friendship--I had no romantic intentions and the woman knew this. Right around age thirty--the end of my time in Texas and the start of my time here--I had quite a few women in my life; unfortunately, none of them ended up quite suiting me. Since then, I've tried to stick to mostly spending that much time with women only when I had some real intentions toward them. It's not that I wouldn't have a platonic friendship again that involved as much time as that (or those--since most of the gals in Texas were women who I dated who turned into platonic friends) in the late 1990s; it's just that I've been more focused on trying to find someone I'd actually want to settle down with. Unfortunately, I lost out on the few women I'd gone for since about 2003, sometimes because I was unwilling to commit but most of the time because the woman didn't like me in that mysterious way. Quite a few women I've had a strong interest in don't show up here because I could only manage to get smaller snatches of time from them. Since 2010 I'd been fairly blessed by women's presence (though I keep expecting a return to a more consistently quiet and depressing time, as that has seemed more typical of my adult life).

Classmates Who Died

Four people from my high school have died since our graduation that I know of. I went to a small high school, so there were only about thirty or so in each class (my graduating class had thirty-five). One of those who died was one of my best friends, from about age ten through a little after age thirty. Unfortunately, we had a falling out about that time, and the friendship never recovered. A couple of years after our friendship came to an end, my friend's body started to shut down through the auspices of some odd disease, such that the past decade has been one of great pain, a pain I could only read about third-hand through a blog that at the end of April came to an conclusion.

Here is a chart of the way people from my high school have died:

All of the deaths are unique, as I guess in some way all deaths are. The first to go was someone else in my own class; he died within a year, in a motorbike accident. Tragic as it was, somehow, it didn't seem surprising; he had always had something of a wild streak in him. I don't remember the order of the second and third, but suffice it to say that marriage did them both in: one had a wife who left him and his response was to hang himself; the other had a husband who killed her. They were each a couple of years ahead of my own class in high school.

Forty-two seems a young age to die, let alone nineteen or one's twenties. But I suspect that as I grow older now, the deaths will begin to mount up, more and more of them by disease.

Places Heather Has Been Sited

My friend Heather requested to be part of a chart on my blog, so here it is.

I live in what is in some ways a small town, even though well over one hundred thousand people live here. What I mean by that is that within certain circles, one tends to come across certain people with a degree of regularity. Hence, you'll meet someone who you might well have met many times in the past but never really registered as more than a face.

Back toward the end of March, I met a gal who I didn't recognize at first as someone I already sort of knew. The reason: She was wearing glasses, which I'd never known her to do before. She is someone who skates in similar circles. I'd seen her play in a band a friend of mine was in, and I'd seen her play one or two solo shows when she was playing among a list of other musicians I knew. Finally, I'd seen her a few times--and been introduced to her or vaguely hung out on the edge of shared conversations with her among shared acquaintances--at a bar I frequent. She struck me as an attractive woman I would likely not have much in common with. I don't know exactly how I came to that assessment, since we'd probably exchanged all of two sentences in the years I'd known (of) her. Perhaps, it's that I'm a personally very conservative person, while most of the people I have contact with in town trend pretty liberal (that said, most of my nonchurch friends are fairly liberal and many of them would say I'm liberal too--I guess much just depends on how one assesses these things; I tend to feel like an leftist oddball among religious people and a rightest oddball among the artistic crowd I often mix with).

So in March, I went to see a performance of Indonesian-like music at the college music hall, mostly because a band I like called Electrophoria was among the participants. Heather struck up a conversation with me as I walked into the hall. Should I sit with her? I wondered. Well, why not? Neither of us were with people, a friend of mine having turned me down for the event. I'm glad of that, since it meant I got to spend the evening getting to know her. It was only after she mentioned being a musician that I realized who I was talking with, that I already kind of knew her, and that we had a ton of friends in common. And it was only after talking with her--spending time with her, at a bar after the show--that I realized that we actually had more in common than I'd have imagined and that my assumptions about her had locked me out of what might have been an interesting friendship much earlier (though, fact is, I probably wouldn't have had the guts to talk with her anyway).

Anyway, since that evening in March, I've had several more occasions to run into Heather or hang out with her, and it's been a joy each time. Heather is this incredible combination of sweetness, cuteness, strong-headedness, quirkiness, and, well, funness (is that a word?). I'm glad I've gotten a chance to get to know her and to spend time with her. Below is a map of places at which Heather and I have been present at the same time:

Facebook Friends

I have a lot more women friends on Facebook than men. I feel a bit embarrassed by how disparate the difference, as if I'm some sort of love and leave them sort (this from a guy who's never managed to get them in the first place). I guess I'm just too nice a guy to have a gal take an interest in me as more than friends. Here's the breakdown:

Different parts of my life render different levels of Facebook friends. The church friends are probably where a large chunk of the women tally up (and I guess I did try lamely to date some share of them). Then again, so would work be largely female, since I work in a profession that is dominated by women (about 70 percent of my coworkers are women). And even my relatives--I have only one male cousin. I'm surprised by how many high school acquaintances I'm connected with versus grad school; I made no lasting undergrad friends. Local friends take up a large share; I wonder how much of that is a testament to how much I like where I live and how comfortable I am in this setting versus how much of that is simply a result of where I am/was living when Facebook came into being (that is, would I have more Texas friends if Facebook had come into being when I was living there?).

Al Is back in Town

My friend Al is moving back to town this weekend. This means that I'll be seeing him on regular occasions again. He's been gone about four years, off at two different graduate schools in two different states. Somehow, we've managed to keep in touch. It helps that his love of Athens has never subsided and his parents live nearby. Hence, he's been back with some regularity.

Al is a mysterious guy to me--he never seems short of friends or of new acquaintances. I, on the other hand, feel perennially short of them; I find making new friends or feeling comfortable around new people--or even many "old" people--difficult. But Al puts a person at ease.

That I still know Al, after having met him over fifteen years ago, seems in some ways amazing. We went to graduate school together. We were in a writing group together, and on a few occasions did social things together. But I wouldn't have thought of him at the time as my closest pal at grad school. After he moved on, we exchanged letters and more rarely phone calls (this, before the days when e-mail was common, so we're talking real letters). In other words, we stayed in touch. I only stayed in touch with three other grad students, one of whom has since dropped out of my life and two of whom (i.e., a couple) have kept up a very irregular though wonderful acquaintance. With Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like, a lot of other friends from those days have since gotten back in touch, which is great too.

But Al has become something more than a grad school buddy. He's become one of my closest friends.

Recently, Al completed a novel. I haven't read it--not that I don't want to (but I haven't been given a copy). Others have, though, and I've been told I am in it, neuroses and all. One of those neuroses is what inspired me to start doing this blog--my desire to document things in a statistical format. And so, it seems fitting, since Al is moving back to town, to document what interactions I've managed to have with Al since he left. That information, however, would have been very difficult to put together, so I've settled for this much more narrow graphic--the interaction I've had with Al in the past year. So here it is, a map of places I've hung out with Al since last May.