It’s amazing that I am almost thirty-one years old and I still have to remind myself that if I want to go out, I have to ask people to go out, that just refreshing my email over and over and waiting for the phone to ring is not going to ameliorate my social life. I spent the weekend getting more and more upset about my solitary and unpopular state, but I couldn’t do the math (Pressing “Contacts” + scrolling through until someone nice’s name shows up + pressing “Call” = fun time had by all) that would allow me to hang out with other people. I kept looking for my friends with whom I’d made no plans, wherever I went, and kept not finding them.
It was awful. When I was sitting at good old Cupcake Royale I kept looking at the door expecting that someone I knew would walk in and order a chocolate-with-lavendar or maybe a red-devil-with-cream-cheese. When I was getting my eyes dilated at the eye doctor’s I kept looking forward to a leisurely lunch I wasn’t having at the 74th Street. I didn’t run into anyone fun either by the grapefruit aisle at the store or by the pluots at the market. It was sad, sad, sad, and I kept getting madder and madder as the weekend hours went by. I never did speak to anyone the entire weekend who wasn’t a housemate that I happened to see by the dishwasher.
This morning I was thoroughly sick of myself by the time I got up and got ready to go to work, and after a playlist’s worth of moody music suitable for a rainy Monday morning bus ride I was ready to take action and get out of my head and start emailing…and what do you know? My calendar has filled right up! All I had to do was write my friends and say “Hey! Let’s hang out!” and lo and behold, they all wanted to hang out. Why couldn’t I do that last week? What kind of point was I trying to make? Why did I wait for other people to initiate? What was I thinking?
I was daydreaming a little about New Zealand this past weekend, as I am wont to do, and I thought about what my social life will be like there, if I’ll even have a social life. I tried to imagine myself in eight months, trying to make new friends in an entirely new context, and I wondered if, in eight months, I’ll be kicking my January self for not making more of an effort to hang out with people at home. “They were right there, Future Me fumes as she walks unfamiliar streets and makes a left when she should have made a right and feels far away from everything. “You could have gone out whenever you wanted and you didn’t because you were a fool.” She’ll think about the goat-cheese oriented dinners she could have made with people, the movies she could have seen and the walks around Green Lake she could have taken. She’ll think about all the time she spent in her pajamas…and don’t get her wrong, she loves her pajamas…that maybe could have been better spent singing karaoke or going bowling or baking cookies with people she cares about. She’ll shake her head at how stupid and self-absorbed her January self was and she’ll miss her friends at home all the more, wondering what they’re doing without her.
Some things I guess you never really learn, or at least not once. Some things you can only practice, over and over. Instead of feeling preemptively sorry for the me of eight months from now I want to make sure to treat her as well as I can now, make sure she doesn’t regret what her January self was doing and thinking and feeling. She’s going to have a tough enough time, I think, without regretting ultimately preventable social stupidity.