ghosts are good company

i got this link from my friend jaci. the simple origins of this link on seattle’s social dysfunction are telling - jaci and i met online when i was in tenth grade. she was blogging out of kent(?) and i was blogging out of dash point and it took me moving away from seattle and moving back for us to meet. jaci is one of my best friends, and yet we have immense difficulty getting together (when i’m in town) - it seems like with all of my friends, there is a challenge of figuring how to go from wanting to do something to actually doing it. jaci and i talked about getting together for literal years before we did.

The Seattle Times: Pacific Northwest Magazine : Our Social Disease

“There’s no sexual energy here at all,” he says. Seattle is “a city of the mind . . . a city of geeks. People here . . . they totally blow you off. And these are good friends, right? They just don’t call you. It’s unbelievable.”

i see this with all of my friends from seattle, and i wonder how it affects me as somebody who has moved to other cities but remains rooted in the emerald city (emeralds are beautiful but cold).

Seattle is like that popular girl in high school. The one who gets your vote for homecoming queen because she always smiles and says hello. But she doesn’t know your name and doesn’t care to. She doesn’t want to be your friend. She’s just being nice.

there’s been this trouble with me and people. in large communities (high school, and college), there’s this thing where everybody seems to know me. this would be great, but i don’t know them. i don’t know why i know them. but i say hi and i will chat with them… and i won’t know who they are and i probably won’t remember them the next time we have the same awkward but pleasant conversation. did i mention that i was prom king? i was just being nice.

i chat with people on the buses here. in elevators, cubbie and i have had good conversations with people. i made my best contacts in a series of one-day classes, while not really connecting to people in my long-term classes. i have email addresses for those people, but i haven’t yet contacted those folks - even though i’ve blogged about how great the last class was - and i’ll probably lose the addresses before i use them.

what is that? blaming it on seattle seems useful. cubbie talked about how much trouble he had socializing when we moved here, but i didn’t hear anything about that when he moved to seattle. more than once i’ve remarked on how amazing it is that cubbie wasn’t a native seattleite. i am fascinated.

one of my favorite stories to tell is about how i cope with my agoraphobia by befriending people in public. this summer, cubbie and i went to see kimya dawson and the mountain goats at neumos (why must they have a scary clown on their webpage?! oh look, mountain goats are playing there on march first. that means they’re playin *here* march seventh through ninth! delightful.). we got there early and, feeling very awkward, i wandered over to find some comfort in the presence of kimya - who is a friend, in the she - is - very - popular - and - has - a - lot - of - people - who - want - to - be - her - friends - so - that - she - is - nice - to - me - but - probably - doesn’t - remember - my - name sense. see above, i suppose (this is also such a weird time, mediawise, for being friends with your heroes). so we chatted and i chatted with people around her and i felt better, and then cubbie came back (from where?) and so we found a place in front of the stage and set up camp, maybe sitting on the floor (which is a conversation-starter in itself. on our first date we sat on the floor in front of the stage before the show and met all of our neighbors), and eventually got to know the people standing next to us, who were super cool and really helped the show be more fun. they were more into the mountain goats and we were more into kimya, so averaging that out meant that we were all super excited about everything. they offered us alcohol which we didn’t take and we all got along and had a lot of fun. which was more fun than just getting mad at them for shoving us. and the moral of the story? is that we never knew their names. and we never saw them again.

i have better relationships with strangers than i do with my friends, i suppose is the point here. i’m fascinated by what my seattle family might have to say about this. anyone? (beuller?)