Something

We've obviously become a little distracted by school and the like. Something that's been on my mind lately as I've been missing my college-shackled buddies is how much we get entwined in the lives of those we care about. That old trite aphorism rings in my ears: "Make new friends but keep the old; one is silver and the other's gold." When I was little I was very confused by which was which. Were the old friends gold, or only silver? Whether by a sad penchant for nostalgia or otherwise, I find myself with a strong connection to a relatively small group of friends that I have bonded with over the past five years or so. Some longer, some shorter. While I support the idea of embracing the present and making new friends, there is something about those who have known you through some of your most formative years. There's no exposition necessary. They've seen you at your highest and lowest, when you're at your most beautiful and when you were a total prick. And while it might seem like this could get boring, it's oddly comforting for me. Maybe it's like a marriage.

Another point I enjoy pondering is whether you would rather live in endless infatuation with someone, or dwell in the familiarity but potentially passionlessness of a committed relationship. Most people answer with the latter (it is what most of us hope to have in the long run), and while I largely agree there is something undeniable about the fire of infatuation. Maybe it stems from my relative lack of experience in the dating world, but it's almost like a reversion back to innocence. Like the first time you tried cotton candy, or went to a baseball game, or made a cd with your best friends in a band. You know what I'm talking about. Like you're part of something so much bigger, but all that matters is that your little piece of the puzzle is perfect. I'm not saying it's unattainable in the long run, but the newness is refreshing.

Maybe one of the problems is that my mind is very cinematic. Give me a moment, and I'll give you the perfect song for it. And because of this, I keep looking for the perfect ending. Not like a Hollywood bimbo in a fast car, but the whole near-death battle-scarred end of the world love affair with John Williams composing the score. Or maybe Zach Braff can put together an indie soundtrack. The point is that this produces a host of problems when you come back to the real world. Keep in mind, this is from a writer musician with a propensity for the depressing, but it's true on at least some plane.

If you're looking for the South Park moral at the end, I suppose a balance is important. Ideally relationships will inhabit both the infatuation and the commitment (as well as the intimate for all you psych students out there) to form the consummate. And yes, dreaming and poetry and even self-doubt are important brushstrokes along the way towards the unveiling, but you can't live in an escape. Or perhaps this all just proves to show my indecision and curse as the eternal moderate. Maybe it's time for bed. Maybe you're pretty cool if you read all this. Maybe we should be silver friends, and given enough time, perhaps a bit more.

jbk

Pardon me while I burst into nostalgia

I’m late again. I thought that by being 8 hours ahead of California, I could get in a Saturday morning entry and make it look like I finished it Friday night. Until I slept in till 12:20. It’s now 2:42 my time, which means California around 6:42 am. And Jimmy beat me to it.

Which brings us to this week’s topic: friendship. Without revealing their secret identities, the group of five which Jimmy referenced was enough to throw me back, along with Drew’s wince-inducing pictures on facebook, showing us in all our voice-changing glory, the souvenirs of a time of awkwardness as well as unabashed love. But before I met the other three, it was Jimmy and me.

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a love letter to St. James, it’s just that even now, here we are with traces of competition in our blood. My first “real” encounter with Jimmy was when we were both running for class vice president in, I believe, fifth or sixth grade. Now Jimmy had run several times before, and I was a newcomer. The presidential race was a popularity contest, and in a lesson that would not sink in until much later, the boy who won had nothing to say at all, he was simply well known. I think it would be safe to say, however, that Jimmy and I were not the cool kids. Not uncool, per se, but flashing a smile wasn’t going to do it. A long story short, for no discernable reason, I ended up edging Jimmy out by a few votes. And as we sat there, as soon as the results were announced, Jimmy came over to my desk and said “I want to be the first person to shake the new vice president’s hand.” I was thoroughly impressed at his genuine love and kind gesture. He later told me he was fuming at the time, but simply thought it diplomatic. Regardless of the reason, we started hanging out together, and here we are today.

I have a tendency to romanticize the past. It’s like restoring a painting, but changing a few of the colors, brightening it up a bit. So I don’t want to make my experiences with all my friends, the collaborative events as well as the one on one times we’ve had, more than they necessarily were. And still, my heart does move to remember these things – sneaking into high school dances in t-shirt and shorts, hating going to school dances, barbeque nights and 32 ounce bottles of root beer, putting up tabloid news stories around Westminster Woods, feeling like shit together through all our first breakups, feeling great together when the girls were mad at each other and we didn’t care, the surreal spin of hearing that Kathy was gone, the patience in everyone’s eyes when I told them that I was afraid of how close I came, and Gold Bond. So much Gold Bond.

I know, I know, this is starting to sound like a best man’s toast at a wedding where you barely know the bride. But I love these guys, and I know that I can always tell them what I’m really feeling. Of course there are others, and not just men, and you know who you are, but it would be too hard to represent everyone who has impacted my life. You have to fill in the blanks with your own name.

I love film and literature, and when I look at the plot structures throughout history, the archetypes, mythology, the bible, I find that the only endings that have a real payoff are those in which the protagonist has to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds. And I realize that the problems I encounter, the ones that seem to rip my life apart, would surely never be compelling enough to create an even marginally profitable piece of cinema. And even though I wanted nothing more than for them to end at the time, I see now that there would be no contrast for redemption. This is one of those things that makes sense from the outside, but put me in a real pickle and I’ll surely complain. What I’m trying to say is that friendship is not only full of strife, it is dependant on it. Internally and externally, without the struggles we experience together as friends, we have little to hold us together. The joys are wonderful and hopefully plentiful, but it is only when we pull outward from the center that the knot is tightened. And when it’s all done and we’ve regained our feet, we can look back on it all with bright colors and brighter eyes, and raise a glass to all that was and is to come. For better or worse, we are who we are, and when we find others whose liquid complements our own, we can do no better than to pour together and drink heartily.

JBK

Friendship - September 21, 2007

What felt frogs and dead presidents teach us about ourselves.

 

            It’s really interesting that such a cliché word can mean so many things to so many people. A friend of mine recently referenced “the friendship connection” and all it did was give me an image of Kermit the Frog singing his heart out about rainbows in The Muppet Movie (or was it The Great Muppet Caper). We have all these different images associated with the word, (friendship, not rainbows) I sometime feel like it is all one big inkblot test and all the men in the white coats just keep asking me what comes to me first.

            I have this picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a cool hat driving a car with a cigarette cocked proudly in his mouth, on the wallpaper of my computer. The man was incredible! He served as president for 12 years, and brought the country through two catastrophes, The Great Depression and World War II. His most important role became educator and a sort of friend through his fireside chats. The guy came into office handicapped from a severe battle with Polio and the presidency itself practically killed him.

            I wish I had it in me to give so much of myself to a group of friends that I might surrender my life to their cause. As someone who wants to become an educator, I would like to think that I would devote that much of myself to my students. What better complement can you receive than to be told that you were kind enough to give your life to someone or something?

I am not going in a Kent State direction here. I like to think that I am politically minded and aware of my surroundings, but I will be the first to tell you that I will not be engaging in a stand off with the national guard any time soon.  What I am saying is that there are very few things in my life worth giving that sort of commitment to, I only wish someone else would be willing to do it for me.

Who do I think I am you ask. I am a coward, I will tell you outright. I don’t do well with guns pointed in my direction, angry mobs, or even snakes, but come on, who doesn’t want someone else to be that much in love with them. Face the facts, I am not willing to throw my life away on just anything, but I would be thrilled for someone else to do so for me.

I am part of this group of guys that have been friends for maybe seven years, which is a pretty long time when you are all on the short side of twenty. The five of us are all pretty close, hell, throw out the pretty, we are very close. We have all stood together through girlfriends, breakups, heart surgeries, and even put up with one of us becoming close to multiple ex-girlfriends of the group. We have taken to trying to compare ourselves to something more grandiose and official sounding than just calling ourselves “the guys”. We once compared ourselves to a “band of brothers” but decided to leave HBO serials behind, and we remain just “the guys” to this day.

We would all go to bat for the next guy, stand up for him in the face of large much more powerful (and menacing) people than ourselves for the sake of doing what’s right, and at the expense of a severe beating. I hesitate to say though, outside of casual boasting, that one of us would actually take a bullet for the next guy. Not personally looking for a bullet wound anytime in the near future, I am not sure how I would react in the heat of the moment, but it would certainly be a tricky situation to make a decision during.

Mortal combat aside, I am certainly grateful for the friends that I do have. Though we bug the heck out of each other, we always seem to be in the same place at the same time for the pleasure of crafting fresh insults to hurl in good fun.

It’s amazing, regardless of who is dating who’s ex-girlfriend or who has been stewing on bitter sentiments lately, we are all able to put our minor differences aside for the sake of simply having support for each other. When it comes down to severe depression, family loss, heart disease, or frayed relationships, we have always sewn up our stinging wounds left over from the last bout of video games and arrange a meeting to talk things over, sometimes on less than ten minutes of warning. We can look at each other in the circle and know that we truly are a band of brothers bound not by disposition or economic status but by our simple trust in the goodness and love in the heart of the guy sitting next to us.

            So maybe I am not strong enough to volunteer for bullet wounds, or to place my head on the chopping block by myself, but I know that when good friends band together, they can overcome nearly anything thrown at them.

  J.F.

Conformity - September 14, 2007

I am sure you have heard the cliché that “women love a man in uniform,” and if you are a man, you often find yourself wondering where you can get a uniform and how great you are going to look in it, and by doing so, and while looking great, whether you will be able to attract women. Or maybe that was just me.

Anyway, that whole idea with uniforms, is to demonstrate uniformity. (Shocking I know, this is when you start wondering if you should switch to a new writer.) Uniformity can serve several purposes but most principally it makes you feel like you are part of a designated group, for me it was always a little league baseball team, but for others (like my brother) it can be the Sheriff’s Department, military, student body, the list can go on and on of uniformed groups of people. The amazing thing about uniforms is that the persona of the people wearing the uniform can change depending on the circumstances. For example, when I was a little league outfielder (building dirt hills and completely missing fly balls) I wore my uniform with pride, I was proud to be on the team, proud to wear the uniform. The same sort of thing can go for law enforcement, or military, or any number of other situations. You are proud to wear the uniform because you are proud of what it stands for.

Here’s another example. When I was in middle school, my school had a dress code, not exactly a uniform, but a dress code. As part of this dress code, I was only allowed to wear khaki or black slacks and a green, gray, or white polo shirt. To make a long story short – I hated it.  In the beginning of the year it was just another thing that made me stand out, because as the glory of public education demonstrates, there is a waiver for everything, and most everyone else at my school had been waived out of the dumb policy by their parents. Mine had not, and as a result I found myself resenting the process of getting dressed on a daily basis, I found myself looking forward to rushing home to change into my “after-school clothes.”

As someone who has now spent a little bit of time studying education from the other side of the desk, I have learned that statistically, kids are far better behaved in class and at school when they have a strong dress code pressed upon them. As an adult, this is the only reason that I can figure out for the dress code.

Sometimes I think about things like this, the situations that people force other people into, and how good intentioned attempts often end up being unfortunately oppressive. Things like school dress codes, which seem like a good idea, fail miserably when people cover their butts by offering a waiver.

This kind of thinking becomes an even more significant  and dangerous with faith. Personally, I do not really enjoy being forced into any situation. As long as there is force, I want to rebel instinctively. I don’t know, maybe it’s the James Dean inside me. (Or maybe not.)

This situation is particularly damaging when it involves faith for a number of reasons. The first is that it is just down right irritating to be forced to do anything, to conform to anyone else’s standards generally mean that they differ from yours, which can be a good or bad thing depending on the situation. When someone is essentially prescribing their brand of religion for you, demanding that you believe according to their doctrines, it not only sours the palate of faith, but also makes you less likely to explore and own your personal faith for yourself if you are constantly being presented with a constrictive version of Christianity.

            It is usually the act of non-conformity that leads to conforming in many youth cultures that I have observed. The so-called “Goth kids” and “punk rockers” that so fervently cling to their non-conformist ideals, often end up becoming the non-conformist conformers. This often happens in our pursuit of a “unique” faith. We find ourselves searching so hard for a unique experience that we become just like everyone else demanding an exciting event from God. We become boring, impatient, and utterly impossible to satisfy.

            Looking at people struggling with this, I can imagine God speaking to them, while they, all the while are looking in all the wrong places for him. I can imagine him trying to explain, “Look all around you, look at the details, the little things. Stop searching for a massive miracle and pay attention to the little ones all around you.” The fact that we breathe without conscious effort, the way that the flowers open and close in relation to light and dark, the realization that we are even alive in the first place is a tremendous miracle that most of us miss out on, simply because we are looking for other things instead. It’s a stop to smell the roses kind of approach.

            The thought I am trying to get across is to be aware of you’re your own desire to be unique in both your life, and your faith, and use it to your advantage rather than allowing it to cheat you out of the excitement of the little things in life that can turn a mundane day into a really unique experience.

 

 

                                                                                    J.F.