Commitment

I've been doing a great deal of internal exploration of myself and my relationships, the nature of friendship as it applies to me. I don't know if I ever really let anyone who reads this blog have even close to an idea of just how introspective I typically am, or how very calculated I am in almost everything I do. I'm the sort of person who will spend two hours writing a two paragraph e-mail just to make sure that there are no nuances or hidden meanings within that could at all come across without my intending them.

I am digressing, which is a response on my part to procrastinate because I've reached a point where I feel the necessity to start expressing my introspection to come to a even better understanding of myself, and doing so feels a little too raw for me.

Friendship.

For some years now I've expressed dismay over the shorter-lived nature of my localized interpersonal relationships. This would typically come across as a lamentation that I find myself frequently making friends, spending a couple years developing a close-ish friendship and then "losing" the friend when they inevitably graduate from the University and move elsewhere to start their real lives. Some of these people, we stay in varying degrees of touch (my Facebook is riddled with long distance, now mostly cursory, friendships which are much easier to maintain, and I've a handful of long distance friends I know would be instantly close bonded friends if I were local to them) but for the most part, it feels like a longer version of the "single serving friend" from Fight Club. Not single serving, but a soap dispenser that eventually runs out.

I'm beginning to be more honest with myself in that this isn't something that occurs due to the nature of friends being made with college students, but instead I choose to befriend college students because I have to wonder, and have difficulty trusting, whether longer-term friendships and me really work out at all. My closest friends in elementary school were not my closest friend in junior high school who was not any of my closest friends in highschool; and they, in turn, were not my closest friends post-high school. The closest anyone could come, I think, to refuting this is to note my friendships with Chris, Chrissy and Jira, all begun in 1991 and still present, but, by my own rules, I think they aren't refutable. After a small number of years varying between 2-4, they all trickled out of my life, moved away for quite a few years with almost zero contact and upon return, as is natural for all of us, were new and different people in the same, slightly older packaging. I think at my deepest, I considered these newly begun friendships again. This paragraph is riddled with grammatical error.

The longer any relationship lasts, the more complexand complicated they come, the more the energy required to nurture them changes. . .part of me wants to scream that the longer a friendship lasts, the easier it should become, and if that's an honest reality for everyone else, then I, in this particular instance, am discovering myself to be a bit broken. Am I the only one this rings true for? Do I find myself withdrawing quietly from some older associations as I nurture newer ones as some sort of "avoid working on maintaining friendships" defense mechanism, or as a "every one before has proven short, so best keep the attachment level to a minmum" response?

Why do I eventually push or walk away? And if I should, how do I even work towards changing this part of my personal reality?

Come tomorrow I'll probably decide I'm sharing too much vulnerability in my inner workings and delete this.

I Called It.

Dollhouse is getting renewed for a second season. There is a Santa Claus. I am very happy about this. But enough giddy-ness, this post is called "I Called It" and that requires a good amount of pat-myself-on-the-back bragging so here goes:

Amy Acker's character, Dr. Saunders was a Doll: I called it (sure, I also wanted her to be Alpha, but ALL of my reasoning for her being a Doll proved out).

On Fringe, Pacey was really Mirror Universe Pacey: I called it.

Lost--John Locke's been dead all season and is still in-the-box: I called it.

More Lost--Juliet dies: Called it (knew she was headlining the V remake next year, which meant she would likely be toast).

Faraday's a Widmore: Called it.

Jack and Kate are royal douches: I didn't call that; those facts have always pretty much just been universal truths.

Setting off the bomb just sends them back to the future: you'll see in a year, I called that too.

I don't think it's just me, and sure I do have a history for calling it (Professor X is the traitor who kills Professor X in Bishop's future--I called that, ask Micah; Ed Norton is Tyler Durden during the first thirty seconds of Fight Club), I just think that a lot of this season's big twists were a bit too over-telegraphed to truly end up being surprises.