A Hundred Years to Live

Here I sit the night before New Year's Eve and I am wondering why I simultaneously choose to be alone but wish that I were surrounded by friends, friends, and more friends. The first friends are the friends that I have always had and I should not take them for granted. The next friends are friends of friends. I wonder how my friends became friends with those friends and whether, by the associative law, I could be friends equally with those friends. The third friends are for friends that I have recently made but, more importantly, am soon to make. Sometimes I don't believe that third friends exist. You might think that I am lonely. Not exactly. I live in my head and I could easily add friends there. I can add not just friends, but random people from the street like hobos and plumbers. That's probably why I am comfortable being alone. Alone in the sense that I'm not twittering or facebooking people til kingdom come. I'm not overly obsessed with acquaintances and how I can develop their status into friend territory. It's trouble enough to just maintain the friendships that I have, that adding new people into what should be my circle of five (ten, fifteen, etc.) feels like work. I feel that if I don't even try then I won't have to suffer the humiliation of someone rejecting me as a person. And let's be honest, 99.9% of all rejection is a personal rejection. So I put up fluffy walls that can easily be crossed by me or by futur friends. It's fluffly because really scary walls scare people and I'm not like that. I don't want to scare people, of course, I just feel comfortable with my head on something soft and not having to worry about being liked.

The good news is as long as you're alive there's always hope. I forget what movie or book I recently learned that maxim from, but it's a good start to 2009.