So Much Wit

The prob­lem with posts like the pre­vi­ous one is that they set up an expec­ta­tion that you’re gonna, you know, write. Like, why else would you have gone to the trou­ble of set­ting up the damn blog if you’re not going to use it? The pat­tern of start­ing a blog, writ­ing once or twice, then com­ing back to it only every few months to post a “sorry I haven’t posted in a while” entry is famil­iar to every­one, so I really don’t need to go into it. Hope­fully, I won’t pull that shit here, but I make no promises.

One of my Things is that I lose track of peo­ple. My par­tic­u­lar mode of oper­a­tion in life is, essen­tially, “out of sight, out of mind”. This has unfor­tu­nate con­se­quences when you move to a new city and peo­ple who are impor­tant to you stay behind, or go their own way, or what have you. As a col­lege stu­dent who attended three dif­fer­ent schools dur­ing my under­grad­u­ate career and recently started a grad pro­gram, you can imag­ine I’ve watched myself go through this process a few times. The fact is that, on a day-​​to-​​day basis, I am in a near-​​constant state of react­ing to things and try­ing to keep up. Those things that don’t throw them­selves in front of me often end up being rel­e­gated to that vague “I’ll get to it when I have a chance” cor­ner of my mind. (If it is any con­so­la­tion to those who may be cur­rently stuck in that cor­ner, you’re in very good com­pany). For­tu­nately, in all the tran­si­tions I’ve made over the last few years, there have been a few peo­ple who just don’t take that kind of crap. More on them in a moment.

I have good friends from the town I grew up in. I have a very good friend from the year I spent in New Mex­ico. Most of all I have many good friends from the cou­ple of years I spent at UC Davis. All these sets of peo­ple know a dif­fer­ent slice of me; and of them, I believe the peo­ple I know from UC Davis got the clear­est pic­ture of who I actu­ally am. These are the peo­ple I knew when I fig­ured out that Lin­guis­tics was what I wanted to Do. These are the peo­ple that clar­i­fied my view of the kinds of friends I want to have, the kind of woman I want to love, and the kind of life that I want to lead. The friends that I have made in San Diego see what amounts to a fin­ish prod­uct (in some sense) that these peo­ple helped shape.

I don’t mean to get all Won­der Years on you. But this stuff has been on my mind because one such friend, Jeff, the guy on the left with the incon­gru­ent mohawk in the photo above, is to my great for­tune one of those peo­ple who doesn’t take my crap. We’ve been in touch recently, and after a bit of prod­ding on my part, he’s rebooted his blog too. Every­thing he says is true. He’s like my nerdy soul­mate, a reminder that all this shit really, really mat­ters. I count myself among the lucky ones, to be sure.