The Latest Craze

I have decided that the reason that people make life long friends in college has very little to do with the college experience. It is just so damned hard to make friends after college. First of all everyone has a job. I don’t know why people get these jobs, but they do. Jobs are serious impediments to friendship-building activities like staying up all night talking about life, breaking laws for fun, getting in fist fights, doing drugs and drinking copious amounts of alcohol for weeks on end. Second of all everyone gets married. Marriage kills friendship. Married people nest. Nesting involves forsaking other social activities to paint the living room a nicer shade of off-white or spending the weekend looking at saltshakers and bed skirts. Marriage also leads to kids and as much as I adore kids most of them stand out like a sore thumb at a gay bar or punk concert.

I have recently contemplated letting go of a few of my college pals. You know the ones. They never return your letters unless it is with some type of family newsletter. They make an effort to spare “an hour or two” when you come to town to visit them. They want to spend half of your trip looking at wedding photos. They suck.

The thing that keeps me from cutting them off entirely is the fact that I can’t replace them. Don’t get misty-eyed. This is not just sentimental. I literally can’t find available warm bodies to stand in for them.

I am starting work on my grad school applications. I have a twisted ulterior motive in going back to school. I want new friends. Smarter friends. Friends who are politically opposed to marriage, who are studying things that are unlikely to prepare them for a job and who are infertile. I want a cult of highly intelligent, jobless, childless, polyamorous pals to spend my thirties with.

It is with this sensibility that I am preparing for the next decade of my life. I am learning things that are likely to make me more interesting to aloof, sexually-liberated intellectuals with copious amounts of free time. For example, I have decided to take some Latin dance lessons. Latin dance requires practice. Practice takes free time. I am hoping to recruit my fellow grad students into the Latin-dancing craze. Another example, filmmaking. I am sorry, but you can only be into film if you have hours to spend watching it and considerably more hours to spend critiquing it. Filmmaking raises the stakes. Now one must also spend hours and hours writing, schmoozing, err, networking, directing, editing, promoting, etc. Hopefully, by this time next year my cadre of soulless dancing filmmakers will be well on its way to being established and I can turn thirty secure in the knowledge that I will never again spend a Saturday afternoon fielding text messages politely declining my invitations for grown-up fun.