Thoughts on "BFFs"

This is something that's been rattling around in my head for a few days. There's been a bit of bloggity talk about "why do you write this thing?" (both in the broader sense of "why" and in the smaller sense of "why do you continue when all the 'cool kids' are doing tumblr streams?")

And part of the reason why I blog, and why I continue to blog? Most of the time, I don't really have anyone close by to talk to about stuff.

Okay, there. That sounds kind of pathetic but it's true. I mean, I don't have anyone around to talk about the specific kind of stuff I talk about on the blog. I am not part of a quilt guild (and there was an interesting article in an issue of Quilty about some people having bad guild-experiences; guilds can have pecking-orders and unwritten rules just like everything else). I'm not part of a knitting group. Both of these are not so much that I don't want to, but that my schedule and location make it impossible. There is (I think still is) a quilt group in town but they meet during the time I teach ecology labs. There's a "knit night" at the yarn and fabric shop but it comes on an evening when I'm usually sufficiently exhausted to just want to go home.

And some of the other stuff: the yammering about "I don't know what's happening to education and I don't like it and I'm worried that I'm going to be asked to plug my knowledge into some Matrix and that's going to be the end of my being able to use it freely or teach the way I want to teach" is something I can't really discuss with others. (And perhaps should not be discussing on the blog, I don't know. As far as I can determine, no one "here" (at my place of work) reads it). But I do worry, and in a larger sense I worry about what's happening to education in America and how we view it.

(I watched most of "Goodbye Mr. Chips" last night. Yes, it's a terribly sentimental movie and there are things that happened in that school that we would not stand for here (I would never, ever want to have to cane a student! Even beside all the British Empire stuff in there). But....there's a love of learning depicted, a valuing of it for its own sake, that I liked. The idea of a school as a place apart from the world, almost a cloister....there's something attractive in that to me. So much any more, it seems that education is seen merely as the means to an end - that is, a diploma for a job. And I suppose given the cost of tuition and the state of the economy, that's not all that surprising. But, darn it - I like the idea of learning for the sake of learning, and I like the idea of the joy of learning, and sometimes I wonder if we aren't losing some of that in our mad rush to make education as coldly "efficient" as possible, so it can seem more "cost effective."  I will also note that once again, I now kind of wish I had been made to learn Latin. Oh, I think at the time, continuing on with French was a good decision (I had already learned some in middle school, and I was good at it), but still. (That said: I probably know as much Latin as is really useful to me on the job; I know many of the word roots that I need already)

But for a lot of these things, I don't really have anyone close by to talk to. And putting my thoughts out in electrons is kind of a next best thing.

But I got to thinking: don't most women have a female friend they talk these things over with? Don't most women have "BFFs"? (Best Friends Forever. I don't think that usage was common when I was growing up, at least, I never remember having heard it). (This is also partly inspired by some discussions of late on Ravelry)

Is it typical for an adult woman to have a BFF? (Notice I didn't say "normal." I'm trying to get away from the idea that I'm "abnormal" because I don't follow the "typical" path that many people seem to follow).

I don't know that my mother would talk about having a BFF. She does have a couple of very good friends, one of whom is still back in Ohio and that she talks to from time to time on the phone. But in the sense of a BFF, not really, it seems. But a lot of the women I knew growing up seemed to.

There are two women I go to church with who have been BFFs since they were children - their families lived near each other, they used to eat meals at each others' houses. So it does seem not uncommon.

I don't have a BFF. Or at least not anyone I would openly declare as a BFF, and not really anyone in town. I have FRIENDS, I have people who would probably do the marketing for me and cook and help me keep the house clean if I broke my ankle or something, but I don't have that confidante type BFF.

I don't know. Maybe I just kind of fail at the idea of BFF because I'm afraid to say, "Oh, I'm her BFF" because I think "Wait, what if Jane is actually her real BFF, did I just look ridiculous there by making that declaration? And what is Jane thinking? Oh, that's not cool...."

I also think I was a little turned off on the idea because (I know I've related this before) but I had a very good friend, perhaps a best friend, and then she got invited to sit at the popular girls' table. And she passed me a note in the hall that said essentially, "I think for the sake of my new-found status, it's best you and I not be seen together at school any more." (And now, as an adult, I marvel at the cruelty of that, and I marvel at how I just ACCEPTED it as "that's how life is." And I marvel that I never let on to my parents.....they might have commented that "You and M. don't talk on the phone as much as you used to" and I brushed it off as something like, "Well, we're in different classes and there's not as much to talk about" or something. I don't know why I never told them. I think perhaps I felt a bit ashamed, maybe like it was somehow my fault, like if I were less of a nerd and a swot M. would have still remained my friend, although really, I'm sure it wasn't my fault). But anyway. That kind of thing happening at a vulnerable age (I was 13, which I think is the worst age ever for lots of kids) may have damaged my trust of people in a way that made it hard for me to do the best-friend thing for a while.

And it's just HARDER, I think, to make friends as an adult. When you're a kid, you see someone else at recess with a Hello Kitty t-shirt or something and you say, "I see you like Hello Kitty. I like Hello Kitty too. Do you want to be friends?" and it's often as easy as that. But as an adult - good golly, are there a lot of other things that seem to get in the way. (It doesn't seem to be enough to say, "I see you like quilting. I like quilting too. Do you want to be friends?" because there are so many other political/lifestyle/scheduling/whatever issues that come up. And yes, I've seen friend drama (not firsthand) happen when one friend found out the other voted a different way from her. And yes, that drama seems kind of stupid to me but it happens.) And of course there's the issue of spouses and children and expectations and understandings and attitudes seem to be so different a lot of the time when one friend is single and childless and the other is a married mom. And a lot of times it just gets exhausting.

I guess what I'm saying is: relationships are hard. They seem to have been easier when I was a child. Why did they have to become so dang complicated?

So anyway: lack of an in-person audience is a big reason why I do this. Because I can at least pretend I have an audience here. And once in a while someone will offer a comment that's helpful, and while it's not the same thing as a conversation, it's something.