A lot of that has to do with physical distance. This year, I've been home for a grand total of about 10 days. I spent two days sleeping, four playing rugby, and with the time that was left, I saw my high school friends. Maybe. It's not that I don't want to see them. It's just that Princeton likes to have breaks when the rest of the world is in school and besides, even when we are home at the same time, I don't have a car anymore, and trying to do things in Los Angeles, Calif., without a car is like licking your elbow: You can't do it, so you might as well give up and not waste your time.
It's even worse when we're away at separate schools. Our lives are a mess. It's not that we don't have time for each other. It's just that, well, we don't have time for each other. Between sports teams, writing for newspapers, school, friends, and that boyfriend who we haven't actually bothered to write home about yet, making time for people who don't live within walking distance seems impossible. We're like babies: If we can't see you, we kind of forget you exist.
But that's not to say that we've given up on each other. We call every few months, and there's nothing better than friends on the West Coast when you need a distraction at five in the morning. Then of course there's facebook.com. We can post on each other's walls meaningful things like "I miss you!!! Come visit!!" followed by an endless string of Xs and Os, and we can comb through each other's pictures for signs of potential love interests and then, having found said suspect, read wall-to-walls to confirm such things. (It's amazing how creepy that sounds when you actually write it out). It's nothing substantial, but it's an easy way to remind someone that you're thinking about them, or at least that you haven't forgotten them.
Of course, by the time you have an actual conversation with your friend a month or two later, all that Facebook stalking will probably be for naught, and said significant other will be long gone. That's the problem with Facebook: It gives you a false sense that you're still in people's lives, even though you're not. If you take my Facebook pictures to be the story of my life, then all I ever do is get dressed up and play rugby. OK, so that last part is true. But the disproportionate number of pictures of me in sundresses and pearls, palling around with boys in popped collars and seersucker shorts - not quite the way my daily life goes. It's nice to know that my friends are still alive and kicking, but at the end of the day, I tend to skip the wall posts and the stalking. Facebook just doesn't quite cut it.
It's not that I don't love my friends. But I'm firmly convinced that the best friends, your real friends, are the ones that you can not talk to for a few months and then pick up right where you left off. We don't need to know about boyfriends or girlfriends, what classes the other one's taking or the fight they had with their roommate last week. We'll catch up on it all eventually, but it can wait a couple months until the next time we talk. And still, when the world is crashing down around me, they're the ones who can make it all better, even if they didn't know that I messed up a paper for Spanish, or that I was even taking Spanish in the first place.
So my mom was right. I do basically only talk to my college friends. But just because my high school friends and I don't have epic Facebook wall-to-walls, or just because I'm not sure what they're majoring in, doesn't mean that our friendship is over. It just means that when I call them next week, or next month, or maybe even next year at the rate I'm going, we'll have that much more to talk about.
Alexis Levinson is a comparative literature major from Santa Monica, Calif. She can be reached at arlevins@princeton.edu.
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