There's a post I've been trying to write for months. I write a paragraph that I like, and then I write three paragraphs that I hate and that are rambling, incohesive messes that don't accurately say what I'm trying to say, or they sound like I'm whining, so I throw it out and try again a month later... at which point I write another opening paragraph that I like and three more I hate and throw those out too. The post I want to write is about connecting and making friends. I have a hard time making friends. When I was little, I remember it being ridiculously easy -- Me: "Hi, my name's Jessica. What's your name, and do you want to be friends?" Other kid: "Hi! I'm Emily! Yeah, let's be friends!" Somewhere along the way, my 7-year-old-self's brilliant opening line stopped being appropriate and/or effective, and in an industry where I work very closely with a group of people for several months before we all move on to new projects and new "show families," I struggle with turning friendly acquaintances into lasting friendships.
So I wanted to write about the tendency adults have to overthink trying to connect with someone. Children offer to share their sandbuckets on the playground with other kids who are complete strangers, and they can form a friendship in minutes, but adults tend to analyze possible interpretations and outcomes of their actions and just make it way more complicated.
My first attempt to write this elusive blog post began with
When I was little, I remember sometimes going up to other kids I liked and just asking if they wanted to be friends. Sometimes as an adult, I really wish turning acquaintances into friends was still as easy as saying, "Hey, I think you're really neat -- Can we be friends and climb to the top of the geodome together at recess?" ....Kids totally have some skills mastered that adults just don't.
The second opened with a Woody Allen-esque rant:
You know when something amusing happens during your day, and you'd like to tell someone specific about it because you think they might get a kick out of it, but you're really not on a "randomly tell you a funny moment" basis with them, which I suppose is what the impersonal and not-demanding-of-a-response Facebook wall is for, but then you find they've deleted their Facebook account, which would mean that in order to tell them the by-now-so-not-worth-it anecdote, you'd have to text or e-mail them, and an e-mail is totally over-kill for it, and since you haven't talked to, let alone texted, them in a couple years, you just forget it, partially because you're already bored of thinking through whether it's worth recounting and if so which method of communication is appropriate, and partially because you're not even sure if it's actually amusing or just amusing in that "Facebook era of over-sharing" way that a recounting of someone's trip to the laundromat somehow now seems worth sharing? ......What has technology done to the way people interact with each other? I mean, it's exhausting.
About three more ineffectual attempts followed, and then today, in my newsfeed on Facebook, I saw that numerous theatre people shared a New Yorker article titled "Everything I Am Afraid Might Happen if I Ask New Acquaintances to Get Coffee." I clicked on it and read the post that I have been trying to write. So, one day maybe I'll figure out how to word the one I've been trying to write, but in the meantime... what she said: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/everything-i-am-afraid-might-happen-if-i-ask-new-acquaintances-to-get-coffee
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