I have become completely ambivalent about meeting new people. I don’t know how I was when I was younger — I guess I just didn’t think about it. But now I’m completely ambivalent. On the one hand, I hate it: I hate being fake nice, I hate others being fake nice to me, I hate having to worry about offending someone with my sense of humor, and I hate not feeling comfortable. On the other hand, I love it: I love making new friends, I love the possibility that a person you meet could turn into a love interest, I love being able to make jokes that throw the person off balance because they don’t know if I’m kidding or not, and I love feeling slightly uncomfortable.
And yet I have almost no friends in Seattle. Sure, I have friends. Everyone has friends. But I don’t have many friends friends. You know what I mean: The type of people you don’t have to drink to be comfortable with; the type of people you could hang out with on a Wednesday afternoon; the type of people you could sit in a room with for half an hour saying nothing, and you’re both so goddamned self-actualized in each others’ presence that you don’t even notice the silence.
I know this happens as we get older. I mean, what 45-year-old dude has a tons of male friends that he hangs out with on a consistent basis? When you get older, you get hitched, and that new person dominates your life. So maybe that’s what I’m subconsciously getting ready for. Maybe my body and subconscious knows something I don’t. Maybe I’m about to meet Natasha, the girl of my dreams, and she’s about to cart me off to Bulgaria where I’ll have to spend the rest of my life cobbling shoes to support our two fair-haired children. In which case I would be more or less ready, because I would be leaving behind a fraction of the friends I had in high school.
As we get older we turn into cowards. There’s so many things we want to do, but we’re just too goddamned afraid to do them. When you’re young if you’re afraid to do something you either suck it up and do it, or you don’t do it and quickly dismiss it as a something you could never have done. But when you’re older the regrets start. You start hating yourself or hating whatever person prevented you from doing the thing you wanted to do. You get bitter. You buy a house or a car to make up for it, but it doesn’t replace the thing you really wanted to do, so you take up racquetball, or maybe start golfing despite the fact that golf has never interested you, and then you’re two steps away from fake chuckling at your boss’ joke and ordering scotch rocks to look classy even though to you, scotch tastes like unleaded gasoline.
I once read on a LuLu Lemon Athletica water bottle that everyday we should do something that scares us. I did this for about a week, and it mostly consisted of me asking strangers for directions and/or crossing the street in front of fast-moving cars. I didn’t do the things I really wanted to do, like go up to strange girls and ask them out, or rip off my shirt in class and belt out the chorus of Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy.” But I did learn something — namely that life is a lot more interesting when you do things that scare you.
How does this tie in with meeting new people? Well, for most of us, meeting people can be one of the scariest, most uncomfortable experiences of all. But we must learn to relish it, because it’s a lot better than the alternative. Unless, of course, you love racquetball and Glennfidditch.