On staying connected
In just over three (gulp!) weeks, I’m moving out of my apartment and putting my things into storage. Then there’ll be some much-needed downtime with my family in Baltimore before I move to Philadelphia, with a long weekend trip to Vancouver for a friend’s wedding at the end of July. In between, I have to wind up the last loose ends at work, finish packing, find an apartment in Philly, fill out a ton of change-of-address paperwork, and recruit a few strong people to help me carry furniture and boxes down the stairs. (I’m using a container moving service, which is going to save me money but which requires a certain degree of work.) It’s all rather nerve-wracking, but I keep reminding myself that in a month I’ll be done with Phase 1 of the move and doing the tourist-on-summer-vacation thing, however briefly, in the Pacific Northwest.
And somehow I managed to avoid feeling sad about all the friends I’m leaving behind — until now, that is. The last time I moved, most of the people I said goodbye to were also either moving elsewhere or planning to. It’s somehow different when you leave a place where most of your friends aren’t similarly transient. I’ve promised everyone that I’ll come back and visit, next year, to catch up. I’ve got an e-mail address book full of addresses and a raft of numbers programmed into my new cell phone. And I don’t doubt that I’ll stay in touch; but there’s a difference between e-mailing someone two hundred miles away and e-mailing someone you’ll eat lunch with next week.
There’ve been a couple of threads on Crooked Timber recently about this paper on social isolation in America; one of the authors’ key findings is that "the number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled" since 1985. (They examine responses to the question "Looking back over the last six months — who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you?", focusing on the number of confidants that the respondents reported in 1985 and 2004.)
I can think of quite a few people I’ve discussed important matters with over the past six months, but many of them are geographically remote. I have the kind of widespread social network that the authors of this paper describe in their conclusion. It’s certainly likely that some of my closest ties would be closer if we lived in the same city. Still, I’ll take the long-distance connections where I can.
This is why I’m glad that I already know people in Philadelphia and in adjacent states. I hope that wherever I end up going after I finish my MLS, I won’t have to be a nomad.
Vancouver, BC?
Moving, storage, argh, I hate it all. Condolences.