Friends...Again

Written 9/15/2010


I learned something cool about Anne Frank a day or two ago. She didn't just write in her diary because she was locked up in an attic bored out of her mind. She wanted to be a writer when she grew up. Her papers included short stories and the beginning of a novel as well as diary entries.


I got to choose today's journal entry.


"What are your thoughts on the necessity of friends?"


This is going to a sound a bit mean, and I don't intend it that way at all, but for most of my life (not including the past 2 years or so), I would have said that friends are very nice to have, but not at all necessary. I had my family if I wanted company, but I mostly spent my free time reading, watching TV, sleeping, or playing games on my computer. I was happy.


Now, I still spend my free time reading, writing, sleeping, watching Hulu or Netflix, or on my computer (and I still love the games- I just spend more time online than I do with them). Yet something has changed. Friends mean so much more to me now. I'm not sure why.
Maybe it's because of the saying "friends are family of your own choosing," and I'm growing (I don't want to say away- let's go with "independent") from my real family, and more toward those I choose to "be related to." Peers instead of parents, if you will. But maybe I say that only due to the abundance of me vs. parent arguments in the past week or so...
Either way, my closest friends are now of infinite value to me. There's stuff I just won't talk about with those related to me, or stuff they don't care about, so I turn to friends.
It occurs to me that maybe we only need one "complete" friend, but since no one is "complete," we need to have lots of friends so the individual pieces can fit together to encompass all of the individual's friend-wise needs. I've got writing-friends and general-friends (and all of these have their subcategories) and...okay, that's about it. So I'm generally anti-social. But that makes the friends I do have just that much more important.


So, to the giant list of things I have turned you readers into in my time blogging, you are now parts of a Giant Friend Frankenstein (and while I was typing that, I accidentally wrote "pants of a Giant" - lol.)