The Difference

So, I always mention my friends, and always try to specify which friends I'm talking about. I've always wondered why I felt it so important to specify which friends I'm talking about, and I've recently discovered it's more for myself.

Each set of friends is different, but each set of friends has been made at a separate point in my life. Since I've formed the bases for each relationship at different points, I don't feel the same about any two groups.

You've got the group I've known the shortest. The UT crowd. I met them after a semester of college, and have only known them for 9 months or so. I honestly don't feel like I've got that super close friendship, where I can talk whenever I need to, but it's growing. It took very little time to get comfortable around them, enough so that I was willing to drive 5 ish hours to Dallas to meet up with them for a midnight release of Harry Potter. I drove back the next day. Totally worth it, and it wasn't awkward sleeping in the living room with Eric and Cathy, which if you know me make since because I've always found it awkward to even think about sleeping in the same room as someone with the opposite gender, but I'm weird like that. I've grown a lot with these people, and in such a super short period of time I've gotten to know them quite well and couldn't ask for better. I basically met them after a semester of needing someone to hang out with, that social interaction, and their arrival in my life was more than I though possible.

Then there's the Google group, err groups. There's the whole group I met in California, and then all the people I met in New York who get added to the category. Mainly, for this post though I want to talk about the people I met in California, because those are the ones I got closest to. I'm so lucky I got to go California with Google in the first place, and after meeting everyone there I realized just how lucky I really was. Meeting these people was a whole new experience for me since I usually meet people through people. Here it was a blank start, a clean slate where no one had anything to go on except a picture that we submitted and the knowledge that this was a Google CS camp thing. Since there was the added magic of Google I was way more lenient on judging people than I usually am (My judging is more so a pre-screening of people and knowng fast whether they're the type of person I would hang out with). I don't always feel comfortable with them, but when I do it's the type of comfortable where I could literally just fall asleep lying on their shoulder and there would be absolutely nothing wrong with that. The type of comfortable where staying the night in a hotel room with 2 guys and 3 girls wasn't weird at all, it just felt like another normal thing. It may be the extraordinary circumstances surrounding our meeting, but I feel like I met them with a more open mind than I met most my friends, and because of that there's that whole new layer of emotions that I feel around them.

Then there's the last group. The Amarillo group. I met these guys when I was most sheltered, most awkward, least sure of who I was. They've been there through every one of my stupidest moments, and for some reason found something worth waiting for. These are the guys I know I can talk to things about, and yet the ones I have an irrational fear of pushing away somehow. There's years worth of eggshells lying around, and I'm scared one of these days I'll stumble onto the right one that pulls everything apart somehow. It doesn't make any sense when I talk about it, but it's how I feel. There's so much that gets left unsaid on my part because it sounds too whiny, or mushy, which shouldn't bother me after all this time, yet I feel it gets bothersome after a while. I've gotten more comfortable around them over the years though, and now sleeping in a mixed gender room doesn't bother me, but it never would have happened more than a year ago. Since I've known these guys the longest they've also gotten accustomed to me. This includes them telling me when I shouldn't listen in a song, or knowing that their cursing doesn't bother me like it did. I'm now privy to less, and at the same time more, than I would have liked, but I've grown to accept it. This group is responsible for my applying to UT and the Google program. This is the group that breaks my heart every single time I have to drive away, knowing I won't see them for a while. They're responsible for my turning out the way I did, with pushes here and there in a better direction. They're my life, and even though sometimes I feel like I don't belong or that I'd rather be somewhere else, I wouldn't trade a single one for anything on this planet. They're all greater than I could ever explain if given all the time in the world, and they will never be anything less to me.

This blog started three or four days ago, and as such has gone through several different sittings. I feel like I continued with how I had planned on doing this, but overall I feel like that should give you a good picture of what I mean when I specify my different friends. None of them is worse, or better. They all mean something to me, and I wouldn't be the same without them. They're just different.