November 8, 2009
that's 3.75 for the hirtenkäse, 5 bucks for the chhurpi
11/8/09
A few days ago, the NYTimes ran a good article about the Park Slope Food Co-op, going into personal detail about how hard it is to keep yourself out of the peculiar shame spiral that accompanies the place. The year before we started doing this LA thing, we worked our regular shifts at the PSFC, and I gotta tell you: if the NYTimes article is true, and there has been a fresh explosion of new members, I don't see how any more humans can possibly fit inside the store.
Tessa at the Park Slope Food Co-op, January 2004
When we were there in 2004, it was plagued by two things: first, the checkout line routinely snaked through two aisles, making it impossible to shop. Secondly, it was so overstaffed during your work shifts that you had to invent new cheese to wrap, or just walk around pretending to wipe random surfaces.
God forbid if you got assigned to the upstairs office: every bit of information was kept in a Byzantine maze of written papers and folders, and nobody wanted to tell you what you needed to do, nor how to do it - they just wanted it done. Whatever "it" was. I got so frustrated that when I heard an old lady had fallen off a milk crate, I volunteered to spend the evening in the emergency room instead.
Now... I fully realize a lot of this is my fault. My brand of ADD is toxic to taskless busywork, and despite seeing hundreds of people each shift, I never made any sort of acquaintances, most likely because that sort of thing felt incredibly inorganic (at a store that served only organic produce, he notes, with self-satisfied irony).
Surely there has to be a better way to foster a sense of community, since the Food Co-op, while inexpensively providing some of the best products on the planet, always had a sense of dread lording over it... when is my next shift? What will I have to cancel to do it? What if I owe eight back-hours and never make it up?
There are all sorts of points to be made with this, but I'll stick with one: why is it so hard to make decent friends past a certain age? In the past, powered by road trips, the desire for sex, entry-level jobs and a sense of mutual discovery, making long-lasting organic friendships was as effortless as breathing. You simply traveled to Austin and made a friend. You worked with a girl from PEI, fell in love with her sister, spent the night at their communal house in Charlottetown and became fast friends with this other guy who made breakfast.
There are many obstacles once you hit your thirties: if you're a breeder, then you've got kids, which means you're probably too fucking tired. You may also suffer from the paralyzing notion that "you've got enough friends already". But more often than not, I think it comes down to this: you simply can't find folks you'd describe as your "tribe". They're not funny, or you can't really deal with their spouses, or they just don't get it like your old friends do.
My feeling is that it can even bring on a sort of "second shy childhood", where you sort of forget everything you learned about being social, about being confident and gregarious, and retreat back to where you were in middle school when you might have believed everyone else was speaking a social language you haven't learned. Old feelings and old habits from two decades ago resurface.
Or hell, you're still a superstar and everything's great. That's the question: where are you with the concept of "making friends" - and is it still valuable?
Posted by Ian Williams at November 8, 2009 11:35 PMIan, I'm pretty sure you are challenged in this regard more than those of us who stay put... You guys travel a lot, right?
I found that the best friend-makers for me and my husband were our kids' activities. We had them in a co-op preschool (ah, those duty days! lol) and between that, playdates, Little League, soccer, church, and so on, we developed several very close friendships with couples. Because we lived in a big college town, there was that sympatico element in politics, education level, and cleverness in good measure. Also, nice people.
Now, having moved to a different community where our kids are *not* involved (just one "kid" at home and he is 17) I am at more of a loss. Sigh.
I am very shy when it comes to making new friends if I don't have a "buffer" friend or reason to be friends(moms at Ben's school) I think I come off as stand-offish when really, I just don't know how to initiate conversation if we don't have an obvious connection.
I believe our dearest friendships, our deepest connections, take place in the "in between" times. It's the "in between" times we lose, as we get older. They can't be scheduled. The very act of scheduling, insures the destruction of "in between" times.
If you have a teenager, you know. If you ask "what's wrong", you will most certainly get a dismissive response. If you just "hang out" enough, the answers flow. That's the biggest heartbreak of divorce. You lose the "in between" time.
On a lighter note, I love our big dinners at the Farm in Hillsdale, but the "in between" time as friends flow in and out of the kitchen, all day. Those times, you carry in your heart all year.
So, Ian. I would like to thank you for being a most extraordinary and prolific, "in between" time creator. Your Jartacular, your "passing through Georgia" sleep overs, your intentional airport layovers, your sometimes singular efforts to call "time out" in our adult lives,
make you a King among friends.
Thank You.
Until a couple of years ago we were also part of the perpetual peripatetic group and that was certainly a major factor in the friendship fall-away. I have been moving around pretty constantly for the last 20 years and it is hard to maintain those friendships over time. Add children to the mix, contacts do wane. But those who are still around are tried and true.
Our acquaintance circle has certainly expanded with the advent of children, but that doesn’t necessarily mean making lots of friends. Several people we associate with, we have absolutely nothing in common with except for our children-- who really like each other. Sure, they are nice people, but on a different wave-length. Sure, we have some closer friendships with a couple parents, but no more than those we make at work.
But there is something fundamental that changes as you get older, which I have been trying to put my finger on for years. In some ways, I think the way I define friendship has changed quite a bit since those heady, spontaneous days of college. Who I would have called friend at 20, would probably be more of an acquaintance at 40. In some ways, I am more cautious, slower to invest trust or bestow the term friend…is that a function of age, experience, or am I just jaded?
Salem's Litttle Sister - I could have written your post. I know exactly how you feel. I've always been a little envious of people who can just strike up a conversation effortlessly.
And I agree with Ellani - our kids have broadened our acquaintance circle but that's about it. For me a real friendship takes time to cultivate and with young kids at home, time is hard to come by.
I dunno. I think you might romanticize those early friendships a bit. If you're around the adult friends you treasure from your early years day in and day out -- in the context of your life right now -- I bet you'll grow apart from them too.
We know who we are at this stage of our lives more than we ever did in our 20s. We're going to be more opinionated and set a higher bar for whom we call a dear friend. There are more deal breakers. (It's the same reason men who marry after a certain age, often do so with much younger women...it's easier to fulfill their expectations.)
Anyway, the most friendly thing you can say in the context of our current hectic lifestyles is "How can I help?" or "Tell me what I can do to help you." It will have an amazing impact on buiding your village/sense of community.
Great topic. My feeling is that most people form their basic sensibilities between ages 15 and 25, and only the friends whose personalities and tastes were forged in the same crucible can ever really get you in the way that the best friends must. During this time, I influenced my best friends and they me in thousand of hyper-specific ways. Folks who weren't in on that dialogue--including the roughly six billion people who didn't experience Bo Jackson, Big Star, and Mrs. Boles's Latin classes in more or less the exact same way we did--will never completely get us like we get one another.
Yes, I graduated summa in dime-store pop psych.
ah, ian, a great topic indeed...i often wrestle with the "i don't need any more friends" ethos, when i know it's perhaps getting in the way of my finding a partner (in the vein of meeting new people). i guess, the problem is that i feel like i meet new people all the time, and i think as we get older, we have less patience. or, put another way, we're much more EFFICIENT at everything, including making the gladwell-esque snap judgements about whether this person could be a good friend or not. and, while the beautifully coined "in between" times (hi, salem!) made it easier to get past the small talk, find connection, make discoveries about why we should adore someone and want more, we just don't have that now.
i find that, typically, within a few minutes, my gut reaction to someone's warmth, vocabulary (yes, that's unbelievably snotty, i know, and it goes away if the content of their discussion is fascinating), points of reference, and ability to ask questions is enough to make a decision. granted, if i had to be stuck with that person in a dorm for a year, i bet i'd form a different opinion, and perhaps make a lifelong friend. but i'm not sure how to do that now, when time is so precious, and i barely get to see the dear friends i already have.
anyhow, i do think making/finding new friends along the way is valuable, even if they're measured out in emails and visits a couple of times a year...or blog posts like this one. thanks, ian!! and safe trip!!
I've had the same lament forever, but especially since relocating. Anyway, an explanation that occurs to me is that it's typically helping and needing help that fosters friendship. We don't need friends for food, to borrow money, for asylum or protection--and probably a Facebook friend will do to meet your mate. If a clerk, agent or sales person helps us, we don't have to take it personally and neither do they. About myself I suspect I tend to distrust people unless I'm forced to, and I think trust and/or reliance may be essential to friendship--to sensing it, conveying it, establishing it.
I moved to this part of Astoria in 2005, and four years later, I almost never walk down the street without stopping to have a conversation with someone. The theater community is definitely hyper-social, but most of those people live in Manhattan or Brooklyn, these are all people that I'm friends with simply because I exist in this space and I've made it a priority.
There are people who are fulcrums in the great social spinning tops, and I decided several years ago that I wanted to be one of those people. So, I not only volunteer at my CSA, I'm a core member and I try to be at as many of the distributions as possible... and I talk to everyone who comes. I volunteer at my kid's school, I host playdates with people I've met at the park. I show up to everyone's show, I loan out equipment and set pieces and sound systems.
My kid plays with your kid at the park more than once, and I'll ask if you want to swap cell phone numbers. And then, most importantly, I just don't care if we're not that close. I've got five or six very close friends, and I have my family, everyone else is window dressing and I expect nothing from them.
I think that perspective has helped a lot. I don't want my new friends to be brothers, I already have brothers. I can even love someone a lot, but I'm not expecting them to change my life. I think if you loosen your definition of "friend" and you shift your expectations of what new friends can give you, you'll find you've got a thousand new friends in a year.
Hmmm. I get paid to make friends and "build relationships" for my company. I'm the person they send in to a room full of "community leaders and key stakeholders," and I just stick my hand out and introduce myself. Ask me if I would do this for a living 20 years ago, and I would've told you that sounds like my personal hell. But I love this job. LOVE IT. I'd say about 25% of the folks I've met have become good, personal friends, too. Most interesting to me is that I would never have approached a lot of these folks on my own - as I have little in common with them on the surface. But dig a little deeper, and there are some really cool, fun, interesting and diverse people in my life now.
On the other hand, I found that my, uh, outgoing personality has resulted in some really strange conversations with total strangers at gas stations and grocery stores. It's hard to turn it off sometimes.
I've struggled with the same question for a number of years. Even with the explosion of new acquaintances brought on by having a school-aged child, I still struggle to find real connections that blossom into friendship.
Then I started grad school. In the last 18 months, I have developed more close friends than in the previous 10 years.
I think that there are two factors at play:
1) In our "normal" lives, everyone is too busy... Even while meeting new parents or neighbors, most people still have work, shopping, errands and medical issues running through their head - leaving no room to actually relax and pay attention to the other half of the conversation. (don't worry - it's mutual) In the residential program I'm in (an executive MBA), everyone is new and at the same level - no pre-existing cliques and no family commitments while we're "on grounds."
2) Shared experiences - I think that the full immersion and trial-by-fire nature of the program helps break down barriers and build bonds. We had these same type of shared experiences at Carolina and as young adults, but as adults we typically are very "safe" and don't open ourselves to the same type of experience.
Or something like that...
We have a similar issue and see no resolution anytime soon. We have GREAT friends, problem is they're spread out all over the world. The couple who live in Singapore, the couple who live in Hamburg, the couple in New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Austin. Then the different factions in our immediate vicinity: the city friends WITH kids, the childless city friends, the suburban friends with kids, family and any combination of the above. We tried having a party mixing up all these disparate friend groups and nobody co-mingled, everyone stayed within their comfort level. So, we seem doomed to have all these great friends who will never cross-pollinate. Oh well.
Would you mind if I used this picture? I'm writing a research paper about the Food Coop.
can't see why not... what's the paper's thesis?
It's simply a research paper about what has made the Park Slope Food Coop successful.