I love you

and I have no idea why

Let’s go for coffee, huh?

if this doesn’t make you want to give up coffee nothing will

Are we friends? That’s an interesting question the longer you live, isn’t it? If you befriended someone in third grade and were inseparable until fourth, what does that mean when you find each other on Facebook, decades later?

I read a spooky article in the WSJ saying that people coming of age during pandemic (aka social media kids) find it more stressful to interface in person than to chat. This seems to me to be a seismic shift in how humanity interacts. In 2017, the Times wrote about how important in-person communication is to the health and happiness of humans. But now? Science says online is fine, as long as the interactions have “quality” and instead of social media causing mental health problems, there are findings that teens use social media to relieve mental health stresses of real life.

What concerned me about the WSJ article was not that teens use social media (who among us isn’t married to their phone?) but that they preferred to chat.

Let me ruminate a little…

A couple of years ago, I reconnected with a summer camp friend (I had met her around age 9 for a two week camp)—we both worked at the same summer camp decades later (this time for one week). I hadn’t recognized her and have no idea how she recognized me, unless it was just my name—and yet we found we were still friends. GOOD friends. We genuinely like each other, despite decades of having separate lives.

How weird is that?

During the week that we were bunkmates as adults, we told each other everything, stayed up late into the wee hours catching up — and yet since that time, more than two years ago, we haven’t exchanged an email. (Though I smile when I see her name, as I assume she does with me.)

This woman and I spent a grand total of 21 days in each other’s presence, fourteen of those as children, and she is someone I definitely consider a friend!

I am fascinated by this - by short-term intense friendships and how long they last. As an actor, I befriended many people in casts and spent long hours backstage and in rehearsals swearing we would never stop hanging out. I did the same with my grad school friends, my job-friends, even the friends I made on playgrounds when my kids were little. These friendships haven’t ended — they have merely been put on pause, waiting to be renewed when we next meet each other at a reunion, event, or randomly on a street corner in NYC.

totally into this chicken pausing before crossing the road

I have some friendships that scores of years, but what intrigues me is that when I think about how long we were together it was maybe a year, maybe two at most—sometimes only a week or two! And even now, these are not friends that I see frequently or even follow on social media. These are friends I might have coffee with once every fifteen years, and yet we care…deeply care…about each other’s well being. How does that happen?

There is magic in the longevity of friendship.

There are people that I consider friends that I have never met in person - people I met, for example, on zooms during the pandemic (looking at you, Steve & Ann) and people that I came across briefly in a conference or at a public event, but somehow clicked with and decided I liked (yes, James, I mean you).

But what is that mental “click” that tells us YES this person is worthy of our attention? You’ve all felt it, I’m sure—you just… find it easy to talk to the person. It’s not that you have overlapping interests or kids the same age (though these things might also be true), it is more a sense that you see the world from the same point of view.

Here’s a whole article about point of view.

Or even more arcane: you just want this new person to survive. To exist. Even if it isn’t in your sphere, you want to know that they are there somewhere.

Something about them feels necessary to the planet and within moments of having met them, you just want to help them survive — in any way you can. And it is so incredibly random.

It is almost as if you are meant to help certain people on the planet—and this feeling of friendship is a way of marking those people as valuable. And I do not know if this feeling happens online or not, nor do I know if the internet (or science or evil mad scientists) is capable (yet) of manufacturing digitally the chemical/physical response that makes you trust someone. But if an artist can put a Disney Princess filter on real-life women heroines to make them even more attractive to us, I think that some kind of “trust filter” isn’t far behind…

She’s my favorite, though the RBG princess is pretty great too….

So: thanks for reading this newsletter. I value you even if I haven’t seen you in a while—I guess I just wanted to say so.

---

Things that happened to make me maudlin & nostalgic:

I got an email out of the blue from a teacher of English whom I met in a fancy National High School Academy in Lithuania, asking if she might use the interview (about my 2019 visit to the inaugural Writers of the Diaspora Forum in Lithuania) that she had translated from the original English to Lithuanian teach her students about 9/11 (while also teaching them English). She added that none of them had been alive for the actual event, and she thought it important to clue them in. I love this woman. I love that she asked my permission to discuss my words in her class, and I love that she informed me of her lesson plan in some detail so that I would understand the reason she wished to discuss my words in her class. She is a class act.

(PS I got invited to attend the second Writers of the Diaspora Forum this coming summer, and am deciding if I should go….)

PUBLISHING/WRITING NEWS THIS WEEK:

I wrote a dorky Medium essay about this stupid thing that happened to me while I was riding a rental bike. Read it if you dare.

I also wrote an essay about the new Paul Newman memoir which is really a ghostwritten autobiography. Dorothy Parker contributed to my article, long after her death.

I was invited back to the Lithuanian Writers of the Diaspora Forum in Vilnius this summer. I’m so excited to go! I have to submit something for their anthology “Egzodika” — trying to come up with something really special. I only get 2 pages!

---

That’s it for this week, my friends! I got my booster shot yesterday so my head is a little throbby. But otherwise I’m looking forward to my week in Texas (going to visit over Thanksgiving) and will have lots of photos for you upon my return… Write well!

cartoon by Dave Whamond.