Old friends, old habits
Some friendships are habits – things you just do because you’re used to doing it.
Habit: A recurrent, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition; An established disposition of the mind or character; Customary manner or practice: a person of ascetic habits; An addiction, especially to a narcotic drug. (from www.thefreedictionary.com)
You wake up one day and kinda wonder why it began in the first place. Or if there’s was a real foundation for a lasting relationship. Or whether there was anything at all.
I’ve never been convinced that friendships are meant to last forever, and JT Gatto (Dumbing Us Down) didn’t assuage that in the least with his criticism of networks, which led me to look more critically at all my relationships in general.
Not that I needed a push – I’ve been inclined to sever friendships if things didn’t feel right. Ask my now-friend-again Jeff, who was a friend my freshman year of college, fell out of favor the next year and once did a damn good job of needling me by stating loudly something like ‘That’s Arp – he’s not our friend anymore’ with a nice shit-eating grin. That irritated me at the time, but it’s really funny as hell now. Like Madame Blavatsky, he has the sight. Or at least he can explain crap way better than me.
Being a crunchy unschooling homebirthing man shone a light on my relationships with people. It might be easy to ignore mainstream parents in a playground, but the second a ‘friend’ casts doubt on your views, you have to look at the relationship more deeply. And wonder what you have in common with someone who sticks their kids in daycare or takes vacations without their children.
These days I can’t seem to relate to people unless there’s a strong shared belief, some seriously common ground. Not some empty crap like we went to the same school but stuff like children should learn at their own pace/be allowed to be themselves or home birth rocks. You get the drift.
My old friendships, built upon years of partying and the occasional shared emotion, have fallen away one by one. Once you start to grow apart, spending time with some people becomes as fulfilling as channel-surfing. You just do it because you have nothing better to do. Or until something more personally fulfilling comes along.
This has been on my mind (and has been a bitch to articulate, btw) because a few weeks ago, we went to see a screening of Orgasmic Birth at the director’s house. J’s birth was filmed for the documentary, and it was the 2nd time we’d seen it after a private screening in Manhattan earlier this year. Being in a warm, home environment was way more conducive to talking to the others who were in the movie too.
It was the first time in a VERY long time that I’d had some fulfilling social interaction, being surrounded by people who all believed in something that is very important to me. And talking about birth and connecting with people based on that and not the half-assed reasons people hit it off (like digging the same music/movie/drug/drink/fetish/etc). It’s the same reason I enjoy our unschooling support group. Even with strangers, you can skip past the cliches & small talk pretty quickly when there’s some real common ground.
Driving this point home was a Christmas card we got last year from a former close friend and current mainstream parent. The personal message on the card was something like I hope we can get our calendars to sync next year. We’d gone from being close friends to trading business cliches. You can’t get more out of touch than that.
Man, I don’t remember saying that at all, but if it needled you, then it probably sounds like something I’d say. Ha ha ha!
Interesting observations, overall… it’s pretty consistent with all the years I’ve known you. You’ve never tolerated fools or insincerity.
I wonder, though, if the “crunchy homeschooling light” you’ve shined on people was a judgement on the friendship, or on their respect for you? There’s nothing crunchy or homeschooled about me – at the moment I’m eating nitrate-filled ham on a Domino’s pizza and spending the next 5 hours watching hockey on TV – but I respect your choices and the thinking behind them. There’s something healthy about being able to relate to people who people who aren’t carbon-copies of your beliefs.
On the other hand, I do think most of the dual-income day-care situations I know of are a little ridiculous, so maybe there’s more in common here than I’m giving credit to.
I think respect had a lot to do with it. If someone is telling me that they don’t think homeschooling is a good idea, they’re also saying that I’m not up to it. Some people I’ve associated with have been shocked that I was once a camp counselor. Apparently I would be the person to make kids do shots and shoot up heroin. (btw – I’ve never done heroin, never will. I saw Trainspotting and I know that heroin is BAD.)
And of course these judgements come from people who have spent all of 5 minutes considering the idea. Every unschooling parent I’ve met (to be more specific than homeschooling because I really don’t want to know how religious homeschooling folk think) has felt guilt over whether they were doing the right thing or not. I have, and it still creeps up sometimes. But I’m not blindly handing my kids over to someone else and patting myself on the back for being able to pay my bills and afford a fat mortgage.
You’re right about the carbon-copy thing. It’s boring as fuck to be around the same kind of people. The book I mentioned earlier (by Gatto) was THE book that sold me on unschooling over homeschooling. And something that really struck me was how society segregates people by age – young kids in school (all separated by age), adults at work and old people in homes. His argument is that a real community is all the people being able to interact. I’ve thought of things very differently since then. When we went to Costa Rica last year, I had a blast with several people in their 50s and 60s. I see limiting your peers by age as being too narrow an experience.
Or cuisine – that could apply to nitrate-lovers too. Though in reality, I LOVE meat. Except I have genetically high cholesterol. And I know what factory farmed meat does to the environment. So really – it would be ok if you had organic, farm-raised ham. (though there’s the further guilt that 1) pigs are as smart as dogs and 2) they’re pretty damn cute) I really love meat though – specifically lamb. I think I need to actually skin and carve a lamb myself. Sanitizing what you eat is a cop-out. Speaking of which, I’ve never liked ham all that much but I wonder wtf it actually is. Is it the pigs’ ass muscles? Where do you get a big hunk of flesh like that from?
I used to be able to watch a lot of sports, or play video games and such. That part of life has changed. With sports, you have the game & the skill and intertwined is the bullshit of the overpaid and overhyped. And maybe the thing that bugs me the most – people who spend more time living vicariously through a team than doing something personally fulfilling. I suppose paying bills and being squeezed changes your perspective on things, as does being parent (for some peeps), or just being aware of what’s going on.
I’ll stop the rambling now
Don’t worry, Jeffrey. He’s not *that* crunchy. If I had a dime for the number of times he has asked me to pick him up some bacon, with a feverish look in his eye…
We’re going to need
bakingbacon when we go camping, right?You’ve definitely touched on something real here. I’ve severed so many old friendships since becoming a parent. People that once were as close as family became strangers that I really didn’t like very well.
Summer’s last blog post..My Weekly Roundup
I did forget to mention another fulfilling evening that I had recently, when one of our fellow unschooling families came over for an evening. Just being able to talk normally about shared experiences is a nice thing.
@Summer: ‘Close as family’ is a good point. As a product of a popular culture that espoused and still espouses the separation of youths and elders, I created a surrogate family of friends. At least that’s how I see it now. I suppose it makes sense that since I have an actual family that the surrogates became apparent as shallow facsimiles of family.
@Trish: We don’t have to tell the kids that the bacon is real. Or why eggs taste better when fried in bacon fat. Or why ‘fat & good’ applies to both bacon and Bachman Turner Overdrive.
Mmm…. bacon. And mmm… lamb. I do a great seared lamb chop with mint salt and balsamic vinegar. Don’t know that I need to butcher my own lamb, but that’s more a judgement on my carving skills than a need to hide the origin of my food. I can clean and carve fish and chicken, but not well at all.
You make a good point about the separation of generations. There’s too much of a tendency to separate yourself from anything that appears “different”, whether by age or politics. I think people are forgetting how to get along with people who disagree with you, and it’s tempting to pin some of the blame on those gulfs between generations… If you can’t relate to someone who’s on a different level of the social hierarchy, it’s got to be easy to dismiss their viewpoint.
Jeffrey’s last blog post..CSI: Miami
And that “fat and good”/BTO comment is sheer genius.
My parents make a brilliant lamb curry, while my personal fave is a grilled lambchop with salt, pepper & brown sugar. Or salt, pepper and rosemary. With the fat a little crispy, er, crunchy.
When my parents took me out of school and we went to India for months, I spent a LOT of time with adults of all kinds. Small business owners, family friends, artists, neo-marxist intellectuals (Kolkata is THE hotbed of marxist intellectualism in India). I could converse with adults as easily as with kids my own age.
Interestingly when I grew older, I could play and entertain younger kids easily too. Dunno if that’s related or not.
PS Flattery will get you everywhere. Or almost everywhere.
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