making friends is easy

Samantha and I have been living in Denton for something like 18 months now and we are suffering from a terrible dearth of friends. We have a couple of really great, similarly-minded compatriots nearby but they are pretty much it for us. I'm still pretty introverted and am not inclined to actively seeking new friends and since I've been working from home (at a job that is actually located 200 miles away) since we moved, I haven't had many opportunities to meet people at work, the way I've sometimes managed to make new friends back in Austin.

We want to try to join more local groups in an effort to meet people, but the problem we keep running into is that while we definitely want to meet people who share similar interests to us, we are so frequently irritated by people in the various subcultures where our interests lie. I'm a vegetarian and enjoy cooking, but the vegans in the vegan club irritate me. Samantha is very interested in womens' issues, but the campus feminist group rubs her the wrong way. The art groups are populated by elderly ladies and the groups dedicated to environmental issues is made up primarily of guilty suburban moms.

To combat this feeling we've tried hosting a few vegetarian potlucks at our house, hoping that we could create an event that would be welcoming to people like us. Since we don't really have a base of friends to build on, we've relied primarily on impersonal fliers and web communications to spread the word and while we have met a handful of totally nice folks, it wasn't quite the response we were looking for. Its also incredibly disheartening (and a little embarrassing) when 50 fliers and non-stop craigslist posting results in only one guest showing up to your shindig.

It would be great if I could meet some nice folks in my new job endeavors outside of the home, but I'm not holding my hopes too high on that score. My new plan is to just get more involved with groups that I can stomach and host stuff outside of our home and perhaps a little more neutral, since I can entirely understand that going to any kind of gathering at a stranger's home can be sort of intimidating. Or maybe I'm going about this entirely wrong. The biggest problem is that I've never been faced with this situation before at all. I've never been tasked with seeking out new friends. My friends are either people I've known since I was six years old or that I've met while working. I'm not even sure I have the social skills necessary to undertake this challenge.

New Year Order

Another new year is upon me and I am readying myself for a lot of change this year. I'm going to be changing jobs around and doing a bit of personal inventory so I can figure out what it is I want to do with my life. I am very excited and looking forward to new challenges. I have a few goals and resolutions, but I think if enumerate them here, there will be a record of my attempts and it will be all the more sad if I can't pull it all off... For example in this new year I will not make a common resolution of mine to blog more frequently. These announcements from me in the past have never worked out and the post containing my resolution always seems to be left alone for months on this site, gathering dust and drawing attention to how difficult it is for me to stick to my plans. This all being said, I am transforming this site back into its original bloggyness (it went through a brief incarnation as the site for a now-defunct plan of mine to host a sort of intellectual variety show - needless to say the interest in such a thing was minimal), though I obviously can't guarantee that it will be populated with thoughtful insights and well reasoned arguments.

So here is to the new year -may we all manage to harness even a little of its vast hope and promise and make our love and talent manifest in the coming months.

the man from unkle

the man from unkle
Well ladies and gentlemen, my lovely sister has just given birth to a 7 pound 14 ounce baby boy named Hance. He is a fine, upstanding lad and a prouder uncle I could not be. Congratulations Sis! You can be well assured that my little nephew's adorable visage will be frequently gracing the pages of this infrequently updated website.