liv | Social

I've had a good month for seeing friends I don't spend time with often enough. I managed long phone chats with

hatam_soferet and

lethargic_man, and

jack and I managed to get most of a weekend with

doseybat and her mother and

verazea, and the wonderful

angelofthenorth came to stay with me for a few days.

I feel really really blessed by having such wonderful friends, especially when they reach out to me when I'm doing badly at keeping in touch. And several other people have got in touch too and I really do want to get back to them to make plans. And I'm not doing at all well at posting or commenting here (though I'm still reading, definitely, I haven't missed a day.)

It's easy to worry that I'm failing to live up to the standard I've always held, that I shouldn't let friendships slide because I'm too absorbed in romantic relationships. But I think that's not really true, that's just me being self-critical; there are lots of reasons why I'm finding keeping in touch hard, and it's not particularly because I'm poly or caught up in NRE. (Really, it's been 2½ years, I can hardly blame newness.) I've always struggled with regular correspondence, and keeping lots of different friendships going is hard for everybody at a life stage when we're dealing with demanding jobs, parenting – and it's more and more common that my friends have caring responsibilities for older relatives, grandparents or even parents.

And the fact that lots of my time and energy is taken up by commuting. I can't socialize much during the week since basically none of my friends live near me (since

mathcathy moved away). I can't easily cram socializing into my extremely tight weekends, because if I go anywhere other than Cambridge I end up not seeing my partners for ages. Also, everybody is ridiculously busy and booked up at weekends. I think the solution to this is probably to move nearer to my main social group, who are in Cambridge and London, and hopefully that will give me more time for friends who are more distant. That is obviously quite a difficult thing to sort out, though, and I don't want to pin too much hope on everything magically becoming easier.

Anyway, the only way to restart the habit of posting here is to just go ahead and do so. Have a meme which

ghoti sensibly imported from FB: suggest a category and I'll tell you my top five things in that category. Feel free to propagate it if you think it would be a fun thing to do in your own journal.

Threaded | Flat

From:

angelofthenorth

Top five festivals

mathemagicalschema

Top five places to spend an afternoon?

onyxlynx

Oooh, "Categories Are" without the handclapping and the pressure to name things quickly!

Top five comedies?

green_knight

I understand the 'no time to socialise' thing too well :-(

It's not that I even see people who live in London, but much of my internet circles have drifted away, dissolved, or moved to Facebook, which is too loud, too transient, and too shallow for me. My relationship has taken away my prime e-mail/socializing time - I now have relatively stable mealtimes (yay), and conversations, and board games and dishwashing in the evenings, but that's taking 2-3h that I used to spend socialising, and I haven't quite found a way to make up for it, even though - as I said - a lot of people have just drifted away anyway.

What are your top five short board games?

ewt

Top five rabbits (real or fictional).

(I have no idea why I thought of this, but now I'm genuinely curious.)

If it would help, I could come to visit at some point. (I don't know if you have space at Keele. I can probably find crashspace in Cambridge, and I know

hairyears likes going there too, it's just a matter of finding weekends when we are both free.)