Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Carlos del Vaca]

Had an Aussie friend that ate tacos with a knife and fork.

[pmcd9]

Had an Aussie friend that ate tacos with a knife and fork.  Thought it was ridiculous to eat something with your hands that falls apart.  I chose to pick other battles.

Wise.

[theinevitable]

So, my nuclear family still have a family cell phone plan, and I just send my parents the money every month for my bill. We had a grandfathered-in unlimited data plan for a long time but this year my dad did the math and said we'd never used all the data, and it would be way cheaper to go to a smaller plan. I pointed out that it seems likely that phones will only use more data over time, and also that once we leave the unlimited plan we can't get it back. No, that doesn't make sense Dan.

Now my brother and I moved to new cities we don't know how to get around and my sister got a car, and our plan runs out of data every single month due to google maps usage. Yeesh.

Yes, I am a 28 year old man with a job still on the family phone plan. I guess that is the punchline here.

[wombat]

Yeah, that's infuriating, but get your own damn phone plan.

[theinevitable]

How many times did y'all move before you "settled down?" I mean between cities/states, not apartments or neighborhoods. A friend from STL posted today that she is moving to NYC which is very exciting, but also means she is leaving behind her BF of several years. Based on conversations with other people I know this was a really hard decision for her but a job opportunity came up that she felt like she couldn't turn down after years of stagnation at a small firm. I also know that many of my friends have had similar experiences-- having to choose between a relationship and a job. I know one guy whose GF moved back to St Louis to be with him and she's still waiting tables over a year later.

I wonder how much this keeps people in my generation single and miserable. Personally I know that it has been really hard for me to move for grad school and then again for my current job... I'm really slow to make friends and it's painful to be back at square one yet again at almost 29 years old. In New York I have tons of acquaintances, but nobody I'd call without hesitation.

[wombat]

This doesn't sound unique to your generation.

I moved to Boston for college, dropped out and went to another college there, moved to Amherst for grad school and had a long distance relationship which lasted through a one year job in Toronto, then we broke up, then I moved to DC, then we got back together.

Also while I'm probably worse at this than many people, I think it's hard for everyone to make new friends after college. Even after 20 years here, my very best friends are people who live elsewhere (from high school and grad school) and my good friends here don't live very close - probably my best friend here lives in Baltimore so it's really not practical to do much of anything together.

[Carlos del Vaca]

I stayed in Lancaster for a year after college, then moved to New Mexico for about a year and a half. Then I moved to DC, and while I've been varying distances from the District itself I've basically been here ever since.

Agreed on the difficulty of making friends as you get older. What generates friendships is sharing common experiences. In high school and college you're placed into classes and living situations with random people and it's easy to do stuff together. Many of my best friends in DC were people I lived in group houses with. Others were from sports teams--soccer, softball. My best new friends of the past couple years are the guys from the band, which makes sense--we get together for practice almost weekly, play gigs, drink beer.
It doesn't quite translate to work, especially as you get older. When you're in your 20s and still going out a lot it can be easy to socialize with co-workers the same age if you're cool with that. But I know as I've gotten older, I've largely (though not entirely) kept work and personal life separated.

[wombat]

Right, shared experiences, and those happen without any effort at school - you're sharing the experience of school. After that you need to actually DO something to have experiences with other people.  Friends at work is complicated and they often don't translate to friends after you leave that job, so you can't rely just on that.

[Carlos del Vaca]

While adult friends are tough, I think adult couple friends are the ultimate white elephant.

Truth. One of my best friends from high school is married to Mrs. del Vaca's cousin, and they have two girls about the same age as ours. They live in Cali. At one point, he lost his job, had some interviews, and was facing down a choice of staying there (preferable to them) vs. moving to Maryland, which isn't exactly around the corner but a hell of a lot closer than CA. They ended up staying there, which I know was better for them for many reasons, but damn if the missus and I weren't desperately hoping they'd come back east. "We could share a beach house every summer!"

[Carlos del Vaca]

Right, shared experiences, and those happen without any effort at school - you're sharing the experience of school binge drinking.

FTFY

[theinevitable]

Yeah. I guess I thought it was a generational thing because everyone my dad grew up with and his entire extended family still live in Boston. My mom's family are scattered, but they're immigrants and never really stayed put when they were growing up.

I like a few of my coworkers but we are definitely not going to become friends. That's the thing, everyone says "LOL it's so hard to make friends in your 20s" but everyone I meet clearly already has friends.

I met one person who seems to be in the same boat as me. She has a long-distance boyfriend and I think (?) that we were both vibing hard and decided to keep our distance a little. But damn, she is great and lives on my block.

[Carlos del Vaca]

In other news: no, I'm not crying because of Patton Oswalt's posts, YOU'RE crying.

[pmcd9]

In other news: no, I'm not crying because of Patton Oswalt's posts, YOU'RE crying.

Is this something new or is it about his wife?

[Carlos del Vaca]

Is this something new or is it about his wife?

The latter. One year after.

[wombat]

Here's an interesting article about an old-school internet community that is still hanging on. Even old-schooler than us.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/echo-growing-old-online/524577/