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shadowkatI' ve taken my lap-top to bed with me, so I'm curious to see how this will work. Never attempted to write on it while in bed before. Sort of nifty. Also makes me feel a tad safer, for reasons I completely understand but do not wish to go into here.
This is a sort of personal essay - the type you might see in The New Yorker or the OP-Ed section of a newspaper or maybe on a blog. Except with more typos and no editors or betas (the webhead term for editor) and zero fact-checking. A personal essay can receive comments or letters in response, but isn't really expecting them and the writer is unlikely to respond. Or at least that's how I distinguish a personal essay from a normal rambling journal entry.
Also while it may be based on my experience, it also reflects my perceptions of other's experiences or what they've relayed to me and what I remember, and memory being what it is, that may or may not necessarily be accurate or what the person said. In short what lies within this post is my own opinions and thoughts on the matter, my own musings. Nothing more or less than that.
Over the last few weeks, perhaps longer, I've been reflecting on the nature of friendship. How it changes. Which makes sense, considering everything in life changes if we think about it. Nothing stays the same. There's a couple Robert Frost poems that comment on that theme. I've been told that life is a bit like a book, each new page introducing something new to the work. Each word a new variable. I think friendship has the same quality.
[Updated - I removed the VM spoilers, sorry, forgot people haven't watched the first half of S2 yet. They are gone now.]
When I was younger, I wrote several poems regarding the nature of friendship. I didn't keep them, they weren't very good poems. I wonder sometimes how many writers wrote bad poetry in their youth? I'm thinking quite a few - I know I've read quite a few and written more than my fair share. Age provides us with the ability to laugh at our own flowery prose without flinching with embarrassment. At least that's my hope, haven't completely gotten there yet - but am working on it. At any rate...one I vaguely remember had the following line, "Friends forever? Not quite however..." A line that is somewhat reminiscent of a wonderful lyric at the beginning or is it the ending choral refrain of the Veronica Mars television show theme song? The lyric is - " A long time ago, when we used to be friends, but I haven't thought of you lately at all..." It's sung with a bitter, somewhat ironic tone. The lyric is striking partly because it is so true of high-school and adult life, real life, not the fantasy that we see on the tv set.
Speaking of fantasies on tv sets - there's a quote from a party I went to a while back that sticks in my mind. We were discussing Veronica Mars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer - two shows that took place largely in a high school setting, a fake small town in California, and focused on a female heroine. The quote was :" If choosing between Neptune (Veronica's burb) and Sunnydale (Buffy's) - most people would pick Sunnydale, which is ironic since Sunnydale had vampires and Veronica's town doesn't have monsters at all." In Buffy's world, if you watched the show and you may not have so I'll clue you in, her friends stuck by her through thick and thin, the monsters were vampires she could slay, and she graduated high school and moved on to college with the same two friends right by her side. In Veronica's world - her best friend is murdered, no one is reliable, and the friends she started with, are long gone - leaving her with new ones that she occassionally hangs with. OF the two worlds - I'd have to say Veronica's is the closest to reality or at least the reality I've experienced -with the possible exception of people being murdered. That, thankfully, remains outside of my experience.
The reason I bring this up is that it links with other random thoughts of late. A book I saw displayed on a table at Colisieum. Don't remember the title, just that it contains true stories about women breaking off friendships. My mother read a review of it to me on the phone. The gist - was that sometimes you have to break off a friendship. That while we are told by society and television that friendship is supposed to last forever, that you rely on a close-nit group of friends a la Sex in The City or Buffy or Desperate Housewives or Grey's Anatomy or Friends or whatever pop culture show you've invested your time in, this is not what often happens in life. As an aside, yes, I know there are lots of people who are still in contact with their friends from high school and grade school and very close. But what they may or may not have realized is the nature of that friendship has been redefined over time, possibly in ways you are not conscious of. Because we are taught to value our friends, breaking up with one can be a traumatic experience, even more traumatic than say breaking off a romance or at least as traumatic.
The author notes this is the case for women, not men. Men, she states, according to my mother, don't place the same emotional weight upon friendship as women do. They don't discuss their feelings. They don't expect their friends to be with them through thick or thin, to provide the emotional support and guidance. Or something to that effect. While writing this, I find myself thinking, eh? Not true. I was friends with a guy for a quite some time, who told me that he did place quite a bit of weight on friendship and considered friendship to be something similar to a blood tie. And he had been friends with the same people for well over 30 years. He was in fact struggling with the redefinition of one of those long-term friendships and could not handle the loss of it - the idea of losing that friendship felt akin to someone dying. An experience the author of the book describes for women, not for men. And I know from having a brother - that he also has felt the loss of male friends acutely. But he has broken things off with them, because he had to in order to stay sane. I'm not sure we can make assumptions based on gender and I'm not sure that being a woman, I or for that matter the author, is qualified to speak for what a man may or may not feel regarding the loss of a friend. I know reading Jim Butcher's latest Dresden, and having watched Whedon's tv shows - that men actually value friends, possibly more than they value family members. My brother certainly puts his friends first. To often women make the mistake of putting feelings and words into men's hearts and mouths, just as men do for women - both sexs, I think, are equally guilty of a type of sexism, just as all races are equally guilty of a type of racism, it is a mistake to assume that the only guilty party is the oppressed party and/or minority party. All that means is one party has more power over the other. If power was reversed, things would be no different, well except for who held the power and who felt victimized. But one party would still be victimizing the other, the problem would still exist. Wonder what would happen if neither party had power or could obtain power over the other? IF that variable was removed completely? We'd probably die of boredom. Sorry tangent - problem with personal essay's is the tendency to go off on unrelated tangents.
At any rate - friendship is a dicey thing. My grandmother at the age of 89 is faced with the prospect of moving to a new place and making new friends. She has lived in the midwest her entire life, she is moving to the South East - very far away. Too far for her current friends to ever visit. And she is afraid. Can I make new friends? At my age? I feel for her. At the age of 12, I moved from the East Coast to the Midwest. I was forced to leave my best friends and make new friends. I didn't immediately. And to be honest, I'm not sure I ever quite recaptured the same sense of friendship I'd had before. But then we always remember the friends we had at the age of 12 with a certain pristine nostalgia. Particularly if we were forced to move away from them. I remember returning five years later to the old nieghborhood. I'd just graduated from high school. To prepare for our return - I'd managed to contact my old friend by letter. We'd corresponded for about two years after I moved, then lost contact. I don't know what I expected from our reunion - or for that matter what my brother did from his - with his old friends, but it was not warm. Or for that matter necessarily chilly. It was like greeting a complete stranger. We realized without saying very much, that we had moved on. We were not the same people we were then. We were no longer friends. The friendship had ended long ago. We had mourned it. Grieved over it. And buried it. It could not be resurrected or dug up again.
Through-out my life, I've found myself saying goodbye to people, redefining relationships, letting relationships go, and hunting new ones. Some of the break-ups have been painful ones, ones I let go on much longer than they should. Because I did not want to let go. I think there's something in human nature that makes it difficult for us to let go of things, even when it's long past the time that we should. Especially things that made us happy or comforted us or we enjoyed. We want to replay those moments ad nasuem, like a tape of a favorite tv show, until it wears so thin we can barely hear the sound or see the picture. And we wonder, why isn't it how I remembered? Why can't I recapture that feeling? I wonder how much I could make if I figured out a way to bottle up those wonderful joyful moments or memories - so that we could open them up and go back to that memory and relive it again exactly like we did, at the time, joy intact. Impossible to do of course, we aren't the same people - even if we could, the memory, what we experienced, would be changed by what we are now. We can't relive it the same way. Or experience it the same way. It can't be bottled up and purchased.
I think some friendships can be described in the same manner. We can't go back and relive them and we can't keep them as they were, pristine, preserved, indefinitely. They change. And in some cases, have to be let go off. As much as I wish to hold on to them, I know, in my heart, that it is best sometimes not to, for both parties. The friendship was either draining me or hurting me in some small way I could not quite describe. Or we'd just grown apart, there was nothing we could share, no common demoninator, we were essentially on different paths. Other break-ups happened purely by circumstance - I'd moved away, our lives went in separate directions, time and scheduling conflicts made it impossible to maintain the relationship - this is before the internet mind you. Now, with the net, it is easier to maintain long-distance relationships - but even so, distance does place a strain if you never see the person. A wise man told me a while back that you needed face to face contact with a person to get a read on them. I've had many net friendships that haven't lasted, much for the same reasons cited above - time conflicts, scheduling, interest changes, etc.
I always grieve over the loss of a friendship. I miss the people. But not the people as they are now, but as they were then - I miss who we were. But also know that new people will show up and because of the friendships I had, the new ones will perhaps be richer. We learn from the people who enter our lives. They enrich us, I think, in ways we can't imagine. And even though friends may disappear from time to time, you never really lose what you had with them - you retain the memory or the imprint or impression of the friendship. The knowledge of the person. You are different today because you met them and interacted with them yesterday. If it weren't for that person, you would be someone else. Because I think everybody we meet leaves an imprint or impression on us, changes us in some small way. Enriches us.
So, I don't believe the loss of friendship is neccessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it is a healthy thing. But mostly, it is, I think, a necessary thing. We can't hold onto people or things. We can't grow, until we figure out how to let go. It's like trimming a tree or plant, you have to sometimes cut off the dead growth or the vines or whatever is holding you back to move forward.
Way past my bedtime. I'm ending this now. Before it ceases being an essay and just becomes goobley gook from my head.
This is a sort of personal essay - the type you might see in The New Yorker or the OP-Ed section of a newspaper or maybe on a blog. Except with more typos and no editors or betas (the webhead term for editor) and zero fact-checking. A personal essay can receive comments or letters in response, but isn't really expecting them and the writer is unlikely to respond. Or at least that's how I distinguish a personal essay from a normal rambling journal entry.
Also while it may be based on my experience, it also reflects my perceptions of other's experiences or what they've relayed to me and what I remember, and memory being what it is, that may or may not necessarily be accurate or what the person said. In short what lies within this post is my own opinions and thoughts on the matter, my own musings. Nothing more or less than that.
Over the last few weeks, perhaps longer, I've been reflecting on the nature of friendship. How it changes. Which makes sense, considering everything in life changes if we think about it. Nothing stays the same. There's a couple Robert Frost poems that comment on that theme. I've been told that life is a bit like a book, each new page introducing something new to the work. Each word a new variable. I think friendship has the same quality.
[Updated - I removed the VM spoilers, sorry, forgot people haven't watched the first half of S2 yet. They are gone now.]
When I was younger, I wrote several poems regarding the nature of friendship. I didn't keep them, they weren't very good poems. I wonder sometimes how many writers wrote bad poetry in their youth? I'm thinking quite a few - I know I've read quite a few and written more than my fair share. Age provides us with the ability to laugh at our own flowery prose without flinching with embarrassment. At least that's my hope, haven't completely gotten there yet - but am working on it. At any rate...one I vaguely remember had the following line, "Friends forever? Not quite however..." A line that is somewhat reminiscent of a wonderful lyric at the beginning or is it the ending choral refrain of the Veronica Mars television show theme song? The lyric is - " A long time ago, when we used to be friends, but I haven't thought of you lately at all..." It's sung with a bitter, somewhat ironic tone. The lyric is striking partly because it is so true of high-school and adult life, real life, not the fantasy that we see on the tv set.
Speaking of fantasies on tv sets - there's a quote from a party I went to a while back that sticks in my mind. We were discussing Veronica Mars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer - two shows that took place largely in a high school setting, a fake small town in California, and focused on a female heroine. The quote was :" If choosing between Neptune (Veronica's burb) and Sunnydale (Buffy's) - most people would pick Sunnydale, which is ironic since Sunnydale had vampires and Veronica's town doesn't have monsters at all." In Buffy's world, if you watched the show and you may not have so I'll clue you in, her friends stuck by her through thick and thin, the monsters were vampires she could slay, and she graduated high school and moved on to college with the same two friends right by her side. In Veronica's world - her best friend is murdered, no one is reliable, and the friends she started with, are long gone - leaving her with new ones that she occassionally hangs with. OF the two worlds - I'd have to say Veronica's is the closest to reality or at least the reality I've experienced -with the possible exception of people being murdered. That, thankfully, remains outside of my experience.
The reason I bring this up is that it links with other random thoughts of late. A book I saw displayed on a table at Colisieum. Don't remember the title, just that it contains true stories about women breaking off friendships. My mother read a review of it to me on the phone. The gist - was that sometimes you have to break off a friendship. That while we are told by society and television that friendship is supposed to last forever, that you rely on a close-nit group of friends a la Sex in The City or Buffy or Desperate Housewives or Grey's Anatomy or Friends or whatever pop culture show you've invested your time in, this is not what often happens in life. As an aside, yes, I know there are lots of people who are still in contact with their friends from high school and grade school and very close. But what they may or may not have realized is the nature of that friendship has been redefined over time, possibly in ways you are not conscious of. Because we are taught to value our friends, breaking up with one can be a traumatic experience, even more traumatic than say breaking off a romance or at least as traumatic.
The author notes this is the case for women, not men. Men, she states, according to my mother, don't place the same emotional weight upon friendship as women do. They don't discuss their feelings. They don't expect their friends to be with them through thick or thin, to provide the emotional support and guidance. Or something to that effect. While writing this, I find myself thinking, eh? Not true. I was friends with a guy for a quite some time, who told me that he did place quite a bit of weight on friendship and considered friendship to be something similar to a blood tie. And he had been friends with the same people for well over 30 years. He was in fact struggling with the redefinition of one of those long-term friendships and could not handle the loss of it - the idea of losing that friendship felt akin to someone dying. An experience the author of the book describes for women, not for men. And I know from having a brother - that he also has felt the loss of male friends acutely. But he has broken things off with them, because he had to in order to stay sane. I'm not sure we can make assumptions based on gender and I'm not sure that being a woman, I or for that matter the author, is qualified to speak for what a man may or may not feel regarding the loss of a friend. I know reading Jim Butcher's latest Dresden, and having watched Whedon's tv shows - that men actually value friends, possibly more than they value family members. My brother certainly puts his friends first. To often women make the mistake of putting feelings and words into men's hearts and mouths, just as men do for women - both sexs, I think, are equally guilty of a type of sexism, just as all races are equally guilty of a type of racism, it is a mistake to assume that the only guilty party is the oppressed party and/or minority party. All that means is one party has more power over the other. If power was reversed, things would be no different, well except for who held the power and who felt victimized. But one party would still be victimizing the other, the problem would still exist. Wonder what would happen if neither party had power or could obtain power over the other? IF that variable was removed completely? We'd probably die of boredom. Sorry tangent - problem with personal essay's is the tendency to go off on unrelated tangents.
At any rate - friendship is a dicey thing. My grandmother at the age of 89 is faced with the prospect of moving to a new place and making new friends. She has lived in the midwest her entire life, she is moving to the South East - very far away. Too far for her current friends to ever visit. And she is afraid. Can I make new friends? At my age? I feel for her. At the age of 12, I moved from the East Coast to the Midwest. I was forced to leave my best friends and make new friends. I didn't immediately. And to be honest, I'm not sure I ever quite recaptured the same sense of friendship I'd had before. But then we always remember the friends we had at the age of 12 with a certain pristine nostalgia. Particularly if we were forced to move away from them. I remember returning five years later to the old nieghborhood. I'd just graduated from high school. To prepare for our return - I'd managed to contact my old friend by letter. We'd corresponded for about two years after I moved, then lost contact. I don't know what I expected from our reunion - or for that matter what my brother did from his - with his old friends, but it was not warm. Or for that matter necessarily chilly. It was like greeting a complete stranger. We realized without saying very much, that we had moved on. We were not the same people we were then. We were no longer friends. The friendship had ended long ago. We had mourned it. Grieved over it. And buried it. It could not be resurrected or dug up again.
Through-out my life, I've found myself saying goodbye to people, redefining relationships, letting relationships go, and hunting new ones. Some of the break-ups have been painful ones, ones I let go on much longer than they should. Because I did not want to let go. I think there's something in human nature that makes it difficult for us to let go of things, even when it's long past the time that we should. Especially things that made us happy or comforted us or we enjoyed. We want to replay those moments ad nasuem, like a tape of a favorite tv show, until it wears so thin we can barely hear the sound or see the picture. And we wonder, why isn't it how I remembered? Why can't I recapture that feeling? I wonder how much I could make if I figured out a way to bottle up those wonderful joyful moments or memories - so that we could open them up and go back to that memory and relive it again exactly like we did, at the time, joy intact. Impossible to do of course, we aren't the same people - even if we could, the memory, what we experienced, would be changed by what we are now. We can't relive it the same way. Or experience it the same way. It can't be bottled up and purchased.
I think some friendships can be described in the same manner. We can't go back and relive them and we can't keep them as they were, pristine, preserved, indefinitely. They change. And in some cases, have to be let go off. As much as I wish to hold on to them, I know, in my heart, that it is best sometimes not to, for both parties. The friendship was either draining me or hurting me in some small way I could not quite describe. Or we'd just grown apart, there was nothing we could share, no common demoninator, we were essentially on different paths. Other break-ups happened purely by circumstance - I'd moved away, our lives went in separate directions, time and scheduling conflicts made it impossible to maintain the relationship - this is before the internet mind you. Now, with the net, it is easier to maintain long-distance relationships - but even so, distance does place a strain if you never see the person. A wise man told me a while back that you needed face to face contact with a person to get a read on them. I've had many net friendships that haven't lasted, much for the same reasons cited above - time conflicts, scheduling, interest changes, etc.
I always grieve over the loss of a friendship. I miss the people. But not the people as they are now, but as they were then - I miss who we were. But also know that new people will show up and because of the friendships I had, the new ones will perhaps be richer. We learn from the people who enter our lives. They enrich us, I think, in ways we can't imagine. And even though friends may disappear from time to time, you never really lose what you had with them - you retain the memory or the imprint or impression of the friendship. The knowledge of the person. You are different today because you met them and interacted with them yesterday. If it weren't for that person, you would be someone else. Because I think everybody we meet leaves an imprint or impression on us, changes us in some small way. Enriches us.
So, I don't believe the loss of friendship is neccessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it is a healthy thing. But mostly, it is, I think, a necessary thing. We can't hold onto people or things. We can't grow, until we figure out how to let go. It's like trimming a tree or plant, you have to sometimes cut off the dead growth or the vines or whatever is holding you back to move forward.
Way past my bedtime. I'm ending this now. Before it ceases being an essay and just becomes goobley gook from my head.
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Date: 2006-05-17 12:37 am (UTC)Veronica Mars is a difficult show to pull off in the same way Buffy was - regarding that trope - hero falling for dangerous character or shadowy one, a necessity in noire genre. How do you do it without falling into the offensive cliche? Mars actually succeeds better than Buffy, because it never quite makes Logan as dark or nasty as Buffy makes Angel and Spike. Spike and Angel - are almost too dark for Whedon to skirt the cliche. In Mars, we skirt it with Logan providing the means (inadvertently the drugs), but not responsible for the actual rape, Logan also sleeps with the femme fatale but does not do it while he's involved with Veronica, nor do we see him in bed with Veronica ever. But we do see her in bed with Duncan - who while shady, is never shown as violent to her. It deftly skirts it. Whedon isn't as deft, he goes for the big emotion, when subletly might be best. But it's not a genre he's as comfortable with. He's more comfortable in the superhero genre.
That's not to say I don't think Whedon was brilliant, he was. And in some ways I found BTVS more enjoyable and more watchable then VM. I don't see myself buying DVDs of VM or rewatching the episodes in quite the same way as BTVS. BTVS took risks that no one else had and basically changed a whole genre by blending other genres into it. Because of BTVS, we got Veronica Mars and other shows/books similar to it.