Meme: How I met my friends

[liv]

khalidz0r asked (in a locked post) how we met our best friends. I'm not a great believer in creating hierarchies of friendships, so I've just listed some people who are very important in my life. I've probably forgotten someone (precisely because I don't have a formal list of "best" friends). There are lots of other people I care about but maybe I don't know well enough or don't spent enough time with to feel as strong a connection to them. (And there's one person I've left out altogether in order to protect her anonymity). Anyway, these are in (roughly) chronological order, not order of precedence!

Spanish M spent odd chunks of time at my school, and during one of these periods we ended up paired up by default. We found we could talk about everything, and she eventually decided I was her best friend. We exchanged letters when she returned to Spain and developed a very deep connection.

PM shared a room with me the first time I went to Hengrave on my own, and we became close over the course of the conference. We've corresponded since then, always kind of sporadically, but she has always been important to me and always there for me when I needed her.

doseybat and I attended the same conference organized to try and encourage sixth formers to read maths at university. She decided that I was the most likely person to make friends with, and she was right! We found ourselves forgetting to go to sleep because we were so deep in conversation. And we've tenaciously stayed in touch since then, seeing eachother when we can and writing or emailing or LJing in between.

MK and I met at Oxford interviews, and were best friends almost instantly. We talked all night, and continued writing to eachother after MK ended up at Imperial, and by the next time we actually saw eachother in person we were very close.

pseudomonas dated a friend of mine so I met him at her birthday party. It turned out he was about to start the same university course as me, so he was a familiar face when I showed up at Oxford.

lethargic_man was living in the Edinburgh Hillel (accommodation for Jewish students) where I spent a summer when I was doing voluntary work in Edinburgh. We got on really well, and continued corresponding by email after I'd left Edinburgh, and then he tracked me down again a couple of years ago after I'd rather stupidly lost touch.

darcydodo showed up at a bagel brunch at Oxford J-soc. I fell in love with her the moment I set eyes on her, so I made a determined effort to make friends with her.

blackherring was introduced to pseudomonas by a schoolfriend of mine, and I met her through him as they were spending a lot of time together.

loreid asked darcydodo to find players for a roleplaying game she was running. And we became friends because after the character creation session I said hi to her in the street and somehow or other it was four hours later and we were still chatting.

compilerbitch was living with doseybat when I came to their party. And continued to be around in doseybat's life, making it easy for me to get to know her.

rysmiel was introduced to me by lethargic_man by email. We got to know eachother by a combination of email and then reading eachother's journals after darcydodo convinced me to join LJ.

Wow, that's a really long list, actually. I'm incredibly blessed to have this many people in my life who really enrich it.

Comments

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

It may not seem it, but it's actually three and a half years now since I got back in contact with you. How time flies when you're having fun! :o)

[liv]

That's actually true. I wasn't being too precise in my description, but I also hadn't realized it was three and a half years. Weird. Anyway I'm ever so glad that you did chase me when I was being useless.

[khalidz0r.livejournal.com]

Wow, most of your real life friends have LJs. :-)

[liv]

Yes, it's really nice having so many of my close friends around. I really miss the people that don't, though, which includes my siblings. And I think there are some people who would be on this list if they were on LJ, because then I'd be more in touch with them or would have been able to get to know them better.

[hatam-soferet.livejournal.com]

"spending a lot of time together," indeed! :) "pseudomonas couldn't stop raving about blackherring," more like, hee hee hee

[liv]

Describing how I got to know you is not the easiest task, especially if I'm going to be discreet about it! But yeah, pseudomonas raved about you, and he was right even though it took me a while to figure out why you're cool.