Something happened today which made me wonder a lot of things. It made me wonder why I have so many friends that I have nothing in common with. (If you are reading this and are one of my non-virtual friends, don't worry - to have even got this far means you are not one of the people I'm referring to). It made me wonder how many of them I would choose to become friends with if I met them tomorrow. It's said that friends are the family you get to choose, but frankly, most of my friends come to be my friends as a matter of circumstance - I don't project an aura of great self-confidence, and rather than seeking out people with mutual interests, I generally just become friends with the people I see on the most regular basis. I don't then select the people I like most to become friends with. The something that happened made me wonder if maybe I should.
The something in question happened while at a birthday party - the son of one of my wife's friends recently turned one. He's a pretty cool kid and on the day appeared to me to have the hairstyle and outfit of a 50 year-old. This may sound like an insult, but if you ask me the little dude looked awesome. Someone at the party switched on the Sky and put NME TV on for some background music. A rather odd choice for a kid's party, I'll grant you, but it was on quietly and nobody was paying much attention to it. The instant the remote was put down one of the other guests, who while not exactly a close friend, is a mutual acquaintance, loudly stated "I'm not having this on; I don't feel like slitting my wrists. Let's put something nice on", and promptly switched to Smash Hits. Now, with the house being full of little 'uns, this is clearly a more appropriate channel, and I would have no problem with the channel being changed for this reason. However, the person in question is a grown woman, and there is no doubt in my mind that she chose the music for herself, not the kids.
Isn't most pop music aimed squarely at a young audience? Isn't that why it's vacuous, asinine and repetitive? Once a person gets to a certain age, shouldn't they begin to realise this and develop a more mature and rounded taste? Why are so many adults still listening to this ear cancer?
I genuinely don't mind or judge you (too harshly) if you are the kind of person who listens to this, or watches Dancing on Ice, or enjoys reading Percy Jackson novels. The thing is, too many of the people I see as friends are almost exclusively into these things or similar. If I try to talk about, say, Radiohead, Catch-22, or maybe Dr. Strangelove, most of my friends won't know what the hell I'm talking about, being instead into Twilight or Boyzone or some other equally shit over-marketed commodity passing itself off as art.
How did I end up surrounded by friends I have nothing in common with? My wife generally skews much closer to my taste, and we often find ourselves unable to understand our friend's taste in music, film, art, politics and more. Should we say enough is enough and cut ties with these people, or continue to socialise for the sake of politeness? Should we retreat to our own world and exclude all others, or try to find new friends? Will I one day snap and find myself screaming "Why are you all so SHIT?" at them? Should I try harder to appreciate the TV they watch; is there a deeper meaning to Coronation Street and Britain's Got Talent that I'm missing?
The truth is I already kind of go through life not really paying attention to the majority of them, instead choosing to focus on my wife and daughter. Maybe when Katie's old enough I'll be able to influence her enough to allow her to broaden herself enough to become immersed in more meaningful avenues of interest, giving me a kindred spirit I'm unable to find in my friends. Knowing my luck, she'll probably get into Bratz.
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GET OUT! NME has a tv station in the UK? Gawd...
ReplyDelete;) Hey, DaveyBabe. ;)
Hello. Sorry I've never commented here. See, I kinda missed this blog's existence, until this morning, when were talking about this very subject and @debcw (or Deb, as some people call her) asked if I'd see this post.
ReplyDelete"My wife generally skews much closer to my taste, and we often find ourselves unable to understand our friend's taste in music, film, art, politics and more."
Yup, this is something we've said before too...quite a lot. The question on whether you should cut ties has become even more prevalent since we left Telford and moved up here. It would be very easy for us to cut ties with just about everyone we know and, indeed, there are some we have. However, while I certainly want some friends to be arms length, I feel I don't want to break ties with too many.
For me and Deb and possibly for you and your wife as well, most of the people we know are from college (or school before then). I'd not thought a great deal about this until the other day when I was trying to explain the setup at college to a colleague. It went like this:
Basically, there were three places to hang out at our college. There was the dining hall where the people we'd now call jocks or the people we'd now called chavs hung out. Then there was the Arts Centre where the people we now call emo or goth would hang out. Then there was this little place called the gallery, where everyone who didn't hang out in the other two places hung out. Some people hung out in more than one place, but generally ended up in one or the other. The great thing about the gallery was that we didn't have anything in common, other than the fact that none of us had anything in common with the other "groups" around college. So we met people from all kinds of walks of life, political persuasion and opinion. We didn't always a agree, we often bickered but somehow we always got on.
It was this last bit that made me think. As you may know, I was involved in various radical campaign groups at uni and for a good few years after it and, when I took a step back, I was amazed how brainwashed we all were. Not by some evil propaganda, but by ourselves. Campaigners, church groups, political activists all gather together in one place and spend the day talking about how they have the moral high ground, how only they know the truth or how they will persuade everyone to join the revolution, forgetting that if it were that simple it would have been done long ago. It's only when you step away that you remember everyone doesn't think like you and that some of their opinions are just as thought out and valid as your own.
I think the same is true with friends. As we get older we tend to mix more within our circles anyhow, so we need to think back to college and school. Especially if, like you and me, you didn't go to a selective school, this was perhaps the only time in your life where you mixed with everyone and let friendships form naturally. It would be such a shame to let that go for the sake of the friendships we have as adults, which are so often through circumstance or construction.
I find facebook a great tool for this - I can keep in touch with people and, even though I disagree with them on so much that they post, I can choose whether to have an argument or just stand back and smile. Additionally, I've found the a few of the friends I wouldn't have expected to gel with on politics or similar issues I actually have a lot more in common with.
There is, however, a line to be drawn. I won't tolerate anyone being racist, for example. I often delete people in such circumstances. Now, whether I could tolerate someone who thought SMASH HITS! was a better station than NME....well that issue has yet to arise, but it's not going to be pretty.........
@Flower: Hello! *waves*
ReplyDelete@kev: Heh, I think your reply was longer than my post - struck a chord, methinks. Fair points though. I probably won't cut ties with anyone - as George McFly said, I'm just not very...confrontational, so I'll just be polite to them and then proceed to moan about them afterwards.