Saying Goodbye

It Starts With One

As I mentioned in the previous post, I have a good friend who decided it would be a good idea to abandon me and graduate a semester early. How selfish of her. This gave me an unwelcome first taste of the inevitable, impending goodbyes I’ll have to say as a senior. I do have to say some good did come of it. It forces me to mentally prepare myself early. It gives me a lot to think about. It reminded me that I too am capable of shedding an occasional single manly tear. As for her, she truly will be missed this upcoming semester.

And Then The Rest

So… I’m graduating. Yay? I don’t feel an especially strong affinity to the cliché fears of “I’m not ready to be an adult” or “Oh no, I’m getting old” (though my concerns are hardly immune to cliché). My fears are rooted in self doubt. For the first time in my life, I have friendships that I really, really, really do not want to lose. We live in the age of technology, with Facebook, emails, video chat, and other similar wonders that help us “keep in touch”, but they really do not get the job done. I’ll get back to this later. This is not really a huge mystery, though. Conscious effort on both parties is how you “keep in touch.” But it’s really not that simple. This already happened once, right? What happened to my high school friends? Some of them are still around, but as I mentioned before: people change. Friendships become inconvenient. You end up having new friends that you want to spend your free time with, and the less convenient ones start to fade. This is where the self doubt comes in.

This next part is going to sound quite cynical, but I’m going to intentionally do so for demonstrative purposes: I don’t trust myself to put in the effort. Sure, I love my friends. I appreciate them dearly. They have been a monumental factor in moulding me into the individual that I am truly glad to have become. I just find it far too easy to imagine myself going through the motions, and realizing I haven’t talked to my friends in years. I also imagine myself, promptly following this sad realization, writing some shoddy email about how “We haven’t talked in so long” and how “I miss those good ol’ college days.” After a few catchup emails, we’ll run out of things to say, and stumble back into the silence that enveloped us for the past couple years. And I fear this will happen because I am the one that can’t figure out what to message next, and I just let it die. Is this the type of friendship that I can wake up happy knowing who I know? No. It’s just a friendship that is resting on its laurels from the past.

The slightly more optimistic reality is that I will try. I don’t know to what ends, or how effectively, but I’ll try. I’ll also hopefully have the fortune to be living near some people I know. God knows that a bunch of CS majors are probably going to end up somewhere around Silicon Valley at some point in their lives. But I’ll definitely have to brace myself for what’s to come.

“I’ll get back to this later”

As I was saying: social media and video chatting do a pretty lackluster job at bridging the distance. Yes, Facebook is amazing because it helps you remember the important people, and provides a nice easy outlet to reinitiate contact. Video chatting shows you the vital aspects of conversations, the non-verbal cues, laughs, smiles, frowns, tears, etc. But for some reason I haven’t quite been able to place, it’s not enough. I’m not saying it’s not quite as good as in-person communication. I’m saying it’s extremely inadequate. I felt this throughout my first romantic relationship, which was almost entirely long distance. We got together during the summer before college, and soon after spent a majority of our time together via Skype. It was nice at first. Being able to see her face after a hard day at school. Having somebody always there to talk to. We went on to have a (in my opinion) quite beautiful relationship for almost three years. Of course we had our difficulties. Our time together during weekend visits or breaks were often blissful. But I guess I started this blurb to explain my cynicism towards virtual communication. You know the moments that you’re upset when you don’t want to hear advice, encouragement, or anything of that sort? When all you really want is a long hug and for someone to sit by you? Skype won’t help you. Even more generally, think about how much you communicate via eye contact, body language, tone of voice, freedom to move about, when you’re talking to your friends. Video chat often results in you looking at yourself in the corner of the screen almost as much as you see the person you’re chatting with. What about repeating yourself all the time because the microphone didn’t quite pick it up, or when someone’s Internet decides to crap out for a few seconds. Of course video chat is fantastic commodity, but if it is used as a primary means of communication, there is so much interpersonal intimacy that gets lost in the translation to bytes. And spending that much time feeling this deflated level of connection starts to take a toll on the relationship itself.

Just a quick clarification, I don’t want to say that my relationship ended because of Skype, or because of the distance. I just want to point out that it is an added emotional stressor when communication felt more of a chore than anything else. Especially so when juxtaposed to how it felt in real life. And as a result… I am skeptical of my ability to maintain any strong friendship if the only means I have are virtual.

Wow, this post turned into a downer. Whew. To end on a bright note, I can leave a bit of hope. I have two friends whom I became close with over the last year or so. One of them I actually have known since high school. It’s just us three guys, we all go to different universities, and our breaks rarely line up. But because our friendship only really started blossoming during college, our group chatroom on Facebook is pretty much all we’ve ever known. And maybe guys perform well in situations that lack intimacy, but we’ve been able to stay pretty damn close through nothing but that chat group. All three of us clearly care about maintaining this trio, and we spend bits and pieces of nearly every day cracking jokes to each other, and sharing entertaining bits of our day. Occasionally we’ll have a serious talk too. These two friendships are two that I actually have almost no concern about losing. Why would it be any different when I graduate if I don’t see them regularly anyways? I’m really glad to have them. To be honest, it grew into so much more than I initially gave them credit for. But I’m glad it turned into what it is. Here’s hoping that we all end up in Seattle this upcoming summer for some shenanigans. So far we have 2/3, and we’re just waiting on the last guy to get a job there. It would be a beautiful reunion.