in college, i knew this girl (savvy and informed readers will probably be able to figure out who i mean; there's no reason to besmirch her name for the rest of you) who had a ton of friends. she knew a lot of people, and considered each and every one of them a friend of hers. she was nice to everyone -- i don't mean as someone who has a large group of friends, but rather as someone who has a lot of individual friends or different small groups of friends. i always thought that the very nature of having so many people she cared about, aside from being obviously stressful to her, devalued the caring.
friendship isn't just about wishing someone well, in my book, which is why i've always been ... not suspicious, but i guess less admiring of these people than others. i guess this comes back to my nebulous all-purpose definition of intelligence, but in order to actually be a friend you need to care about someone and be perceptive enough to see what brings them happiness and proactive enough to go about effecting that. i know tons of people who probably consider me a friend -- or i guess did in college, since i don't really meet people in ways that would lead to this -- who really don't make me happier in any way, either because they don't actually care or because they don't know how. i guess it's a difficult conundrum.
that poorly-worded, poorly-organized lead-in isn't particularly relevant to my life, though. i don't meet that many of those people (partly by design), and this isn't something that's new in any way. and of course the personal aspects of my life are entirely opposite from our construct's. but i only recently (about five minutes ago) realized that something similar is going on with the non-personal parts of my life. i like doing a lot of things, but i've never found any one thing to center my vocational life on. i like math, and i'm happy in math, but i work maybe five hours a week.
the bragging: i'm good at everything. i think this is responsible for my lack of work ethic -- not that i think i'm so good that i don't [feel that i] have to work, but that i feel no need to become top-notch at something because i know i can just pick something else up. i don't have to put all my eggs in one basket, and so the eggs are scattered around the country. on the one hand, this means that wherever i go, i've got eggs, which is nice. but on the other hand if some catastrophe were to happen and i could only guard the eggs that were in the basket i have, i wouldn't end up with very many eggs.
a side effect of this, somehow -- i have yet to discover the precise mechanism -- is that i get burned out on things relatively easily. the weblog itself is a good example. when i first started it, it had this element of novelty, and after i got past the initial stumbles i was pleased that i'd become comfortable with it. but now? i'm ... it's not necessarily that i'm getting bored. it's more that i don't know what else i can do, since i've never developed the depth of personality to keep this going in a non-circular way. i could transition to a journal of what's happening in my life, but there are two problems with this: first of all, not that much happens in my life, and second of all, i don't find it as interesting to write.
i guess that's my cue to exit, but my heart's not in it. the problem is that what's been happening -- less frequent updates -- is very bad for all of us. i'll fire the first parting shot, i guess: i know, more or less, who's been looking at this, and some of you check it pretty frequently, far more frequently than i update it. i'm not criticizing; i do exactly the same thing with the four weblogs i read. i ... i don't really have a point, except that i feel kind of guilty for not writing more, for not getting to know people better in one of the only avenues i have at my disposal in this all-too-internet-based world.
we'll see what happens over the next few weeks, i guess.