meeting people is easy.

Yesterday a friend of mine left town; she'll be starting grad school in Boston in the fall. In addition to feeling bummed out that she won't be around anymore (though this hasn't really sunk in all that much yet), I've been feeling slightly jealous. This weekend, surrounded by cloudless California blue skies, I spent a fair bit of time wallowing in perverse nostalgia for New England winters. This wallowing basically entailed listening to a slightly sappy song called "Valley Winter Song" on repeat and writing my imaginary Jhumpa Lahiri-meets-Bollywood semi-autobiographical screenplay in my head. (I would describe the hypothetical snowy montage that I plan to set to "Valley Winter Song" in my movie, but it's just too embarrassing. Let us never speak of it again.)

I happened to find the song on a used CD that I bought this weekend and found it coincidentally appropriate to my self-pitying state of mind. I like the album; it has some forgettable songs, but a few great ones. I think mostly it was just nice to find some music that I could like without having to try too hard. Lately I have been trying to like indie rock, but it just won't take. Maybe I'm not listening to the right things. (I downloaded "Banquet" by Bloc Party, a couple songs by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and "Twin Cinema," by the New Pornographers.) I don't hate any of them, and for a little while thought that I liked "Twin Cinema," but really, if I found out that I would never be allowed to listen to any of those songs again, I don't think I would be sad about it. I guess I would be concerned about the fact that someone had the power to prevent me from listening to certain songs, though. I read somewhere online last week that people's music tastes are pretty much established by the age of 20, and almost completely defined by the age of 35. So maybe my capacity to appreciate new music is starting to shut down early. I have no idea what methodology was used to figure this out (so yay for half-assed internet learning!), but if it's true, I guess that means that for the rest of my life I will like things that sound like cheesy Top 40 music, classical music for beginners, Radiohead, Britpop, and mainstream hiphop a la Jam'n 94.5.

I don't know how this turned into a post about music. It was supposed to be about my difficulty finding friends in the Bay Area. One of my few local friends that I have actual conversations with on a regular basis (or did, before he started keeping the hours of a vampire, but that's a subject for a different post) and I were complaining about the fact that most of the people that we meet here seem more interested in finding activity partners to go with them to this specific concert or on that particular hike than in meeting people that they can reliably just hang out with for a few hours. Maybe as people get older they find that they already have those sorts of friends and don't really feel the need for more, and this doesn't really have anything to do with the Bay Area per se. But then when I was reading this advice column, the first thing I thought was, "This totally sounds like someone from Berkeley." It's kind of hard to summarize for those of you (is there even a "those of you" reading this?) who don't feel like going through the whole irritating Salon-shoves-an-ad-down-your-throat thing, but basically, someone writes in to Cary Tennis for advice, because there's a guy at work that he (the letter-writer) sometimes talks to, but even though this guy is "a gay person of color" (I'm not sure what color) he has lots of crazy right-wing beliefs, and the letter-writer isn't sure if he should be friends with him. And on the one hand, I can kind of see where he's coming from, but mostly I just like that Cary Tennis pretty much just tells him to chill out, stop trying to put people into boxes, and hang out with the guy if he feels like it. And I sometimes feel like the Bay Area has too many people like the letter writer and not enough like Cary Tennis. Though maybe it's not fair of me to bitch about this sort of thing, since I've probably been guilty of the same thing.
I think one of the things that got me thinking about this was something that I did a couple weeks ago. In an effort to try to expand my social network, I responded to a craigslist ad from a woman who was looking to meet more desi women in east bay. She seemed to have similar interests and liked a lot of the same books as me, so I figured, what the hell. I thought we had a pretty good conversation, not too many awkward silences, but sometimes I got this impression that she was mentally deducting cool points for certain things that I said or did. Maybe this is just paranoia, but I felt that I lost cool points for:
1. General dorky-scientist appearance/demeanor
2. Liberal-leaning (good) political apathy (bad)
3. Favorite album being Radiohead's (good) The Bends (bad)
4. Having no opinion on the Kaiser Chiefs
5. Watching too much TV
I don't know; maybe she thought that I was mentally deducting cool points as well. So I don't really know what's going to happen with that. I was afraid to contact her after that in case she thought I was lame, but maybe she was thinking the same thing. Friend-dating is an odd business. I think my dilemma basically comes down to the fact that the friends that I click with don't really share my interests, and the acquaintances that share my interests, I don't really click with. Maybe I'll try to do the craigslist thing, but all anyone seems to get out of that is cock pictures.