Crews
Last night a few folks came over - part of what is emerging as the New Crew. They're mostly related to the roommates' jobs, but there's no escaping the fact that there's a sea change in the social scene surrounding me. It's not just an isolated person or few either. There's easily a good dozen people who are now part of the New Crew of friends. I'm slow to coming around to it, largely because they're folks brought into the circle by the General and DJJ rather than myself. But there's some level at which I'm dismissive of these new folks simply because I'm not sure I'm ready or I want them. Who are these people, and how well do they stack up to all my other friends?
In a way I'm more or less forced into this New Crew. Nearly everyone I've hung out with over the past eight years has moved, and some of the few who remain are on road soon enough.
I've had several other crews evolve over the past few years. There's the coffee shop, the news crew, the funny people, the barflies among others. But this one is stranger. It's the unasked for friends of roommates crew. For the most part it's alright; they're fairly good peeps and in most cases not half as insane as the General and DJJ. And maybe one or more of them will prove at some day to be an actual good friend. We'll see.
How's it work for y'all, former Catfish Crew members, now out and about in the world, having to search out new social circles? Probably about the same.
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There is always some odd feeling that comes over you when you feel a new group of friends are joining your life. When I quit my job, I lost most of those work friends. Some of them I thought I'd know for the rest of my life. But now they are just extra names in my phone. I go to school and had to redo all my gen-eds. So I'm a 26 year old talking to 18 and 19 year olds. It's kind of funny, I have a few groupies in one discussion section. They all sit next to my and listen to everything I say. But I know that if I told them my age, They'd all just say, "Ehh, your OLD."
I've seen so many people enter my life and leave it a short time after. I stopped missing people long ago and just get excited if I hear from them again. Because of this, I'm constantly judging my new friends.
"Could you be best friend material?"
"Should I actaully call this person on the weekend?"
It's like I'm shopping for clothes, "How often will I wear this shirt? Does it go with anything else I have?"
I think I've taken the natural flow of friendship out of my life. It's become more of a practice... an excercise.
I have a good crew where I am.
I mostly know writers and filmmakers who have fled their home country. Another part of the crew is half-American, half-French teenagers from the bilingual high-school.
I don't feel old or young relative to anybody else.
Also, everybody I know is poor. --Except the kids from the bilingual school which is a private school, and tehy all still live with their parents. -- I will be homeless in three weeks, but most of my friends have been homeless before, so they will give me shelter and food.
Today is the birthday of my best friend over here. He's turning 31. We're gonna party like a mother-fucker. He and I are collaborating on the film project that will change the world, the comedy to end all comedies that I've been dreaming of making. We're totally on the same wavelength. The other night we got together to work on the script. I came up with an idea that was so funny we laughed for five minutes and his sides hurt so much he was in pain. When the laughter finally stopped, he started to cry and for ten minutes went into the things in his past that make it so painful to laugh at what we must laugh at.
I had more transitory crews in New York. I think this one will stick around for a while. I don't plan on leaving Paris all that soon.
It is a practice/exercise. As a result of my frequent change of circumstance, I've become excellent at sniffing out who I will become friends with. It takes a little time, and the occasional misfire, but I have a great knack at knowing who's going to be that person I'll enjoy spending time with. Usually comic books are related.
The coverse of that (or is it inverse?) is that I'm very good at avoiding unwanted friends.
This is not to say that my friends are all the same. In Portland for example, my closest friends are a software designer, a musician/writer, and a 60-year-old retiree. Other close friends are lawyers, accountants, martial artists, career waiters, hippie living historians, poitical activists and so on. So what I always wonder, is what exactly is it?
It's all totally random, based on so many variables of circumstance - location, time, mood, weather - that calculating what makes a friend a friend is impossible. 6 billion people. Chance and cicumstance.
But as far as the "crew" thing goes, I'd say that, since college, I haven't really had a large group of people that all knew each other as friends, which is what I'm led to believe a "crew" is. I've mostly had various small groups of friends here and there that never really interacted with one another. No "crew".
Is it a worrisome thing that it is hard to find a steady "crew" in normal modern life? Would you rather know you will never have a crew again or know that you have a crew that will stay your crew until you die??
The whole thing with a Crew is that it’s gotta be people you can see regularly, and in my case, that’s gotta be largely new people.
And I didn’t mention in the first post, but I’m really hesitant to make work people a part of that crew. I don’t want to bring much of the work life into the social arena, it’s just creepy (in my situation, at least).
I think it is a bit worrisome that it’s hard to find a crew, if just because each successive crew will probably never live up to the Peak Crew, which in fact includes most of y’all and a good many others.
I’d probably rather know I have a crew that will stay my crew until I die, but then again there’s that whole geography thing.
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