BFF

Friends. These people are always on my mind. Some thoughts are good, others bad and many more are in between. It's often difficult to manage friendships, especially when they are of the long distance variety. You often miss a large chunk of peoples lives and in many cases you find yourself permanently "out of the loop." The absolute worst kind of long distance relationship is not the long distance lover, but the long distance best friend. After enough time and distance you often find that your title of "best friend" has been revoked and given to another closer (in proximity) contestant. Friendships seem harder to maintain than a boyfriend or girlfriend. In the same token, friends can be dumped just as easily as a lovers. Where did all of the friendships go?

Recently, I started making connections with old friends of mine whose ties were broken in one way or another. I started down the path of friendship renewal because of a class I took this past Fall. The class was American Culture in Communications. To be honest, the class was much different than I thought it would be. At first I hated it. I did not want to change the person I had become. What kind of person was that? A product of the media. I had very little characteristics of my own that were not sent to me through some medium. So I changed the way I absorbed the media. Some material wants still linger in me. I'm not sure that I could ever give up my love of Manolo's or Prada's, but I can at least know why I am picking that shoe, that toothpaste, or that cereal.

Being a product of the media, I also wanted my friendships and loves to be identical to that which I saw daily on my favorite TV shows. In reality there is no Mr. Big, there is no Ed, and there is no Will & Grace. It is so hard to let these things go because we see these as being perfection and we want all of our real relationships to mirror these fake ones. In an effort to correct myself I reached out to friends of my past and not those of the future for one reason. I love every single one of those people and I feel like an idiot for not living in those moments for their imperfections.

So where did those friendships go? No where. They didn't disappear at all. Some people were harder to talk to than others, but for the most part it was as though we had never lost touch. It was so refreshing to see that those friendships could withstand the tests of time and distance. What is sad is that it is still hard for me to connect to some of those who I never lost touch with in the first place.

Where do we all go from here? It's hard to say. Perhaps we all need a class in interpersonal communication. Or maybe, we need to just sit down and take the time to evaluate what is important to our lives because at the end of the day we all need each other.

"It's been so hard to get it right. It seems like. The moment I catch up. The farther you fly."
-Liz Phair