so i'm on the verge, in the next year, of making a really important decision. i can stay in academia and live somewhere to be determined, or i can work for a hedge fund and stay in the bay area. in particular, i need to assess how my happiness function would react to being a tenure-track professor somewhere where i don't currently know anyone. let's say uc-san diego, which is probably the best-case scenario that fulfills those conditions.
so i've been trying to do a rigorous pondering of the process of meeting people. it seems to me that it's sort of a sawtooth: you meet someone and start out as acquaintances; then, you start hanging out in the same group; then, you become close friends. then, one of you moves away, and you lose touch, or at the very least they jarringly cease to be part of your daily life.
the problem with me is that i'm very bad at the making acquaintances/meeting someone part. over the years i've become vastly more outgoing and capable of hanging out in a group, and i even enjoy it a lot these days; i'm pretty confident in my ability to turn casual acquaintances into frequent acquaintances, and of course i've always excelled at turning frequent acquaintances into friends.
but i still have no idea how to do the first part. suppose i moved to san diego: it's a fine city, but i don't know anyone there. (it actually just occurred to me that i do know jason and erin, but let's pretend that's not true to continue the thought experiment.) how do you meet acquaintances? it seems like the best way is through religion -- i used to think religion or hobbies, but even if i windsurfed and rock climbed and knit i'm not sure that would really help me meet people. of course, i don't have that.
another possibility is to live in a co-op. this seemed to work very well for kelli when she moved to michigan; the problem, of course, is that as i get older co-ops become filled with hippies instead of impoverished students, with a concomitant drop in value as far as meeting people i might like goes.
i was thinking about this at the bishop allen concert last night. there were maybe 300 people there, many of them hipsters but many of them seemingly relatable. i'm positive that there were a couple of people there i would have really liked if we had gotten to know each other better, but you have the same problem with the city move, writ small: there is no jumping off point. victor claims that if you walk up to someone and start telling them an interesting story, this will work, but i can't really imagine that he is right about that.
there must be a way, but i can't for the life of me figure out what it is.