Do nothing friends.
When we visited my family in Oklahoma this past weekend for an early Christmas gathering, Robin and I took Saturday evening to travel to Oklahoma City to visit Eric and Laura, friends of ours whe are expecting their first child any day now. Eric made a couple of fantastic homemade pizzas and those of us who didn’t have a full-term baby in our uterus enjoyed some beers and Dr. McGillicuddy’s Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey1 while we tried our best to help Laura forget her increasingly constant contractions.
We had a great time with them even if we didn’t do much more than sit around the house and talk for a few hours. When Robin and I were on our way back up to Hennessey, we both agreed that we really needed that visit. We needed someone to just hang out with.
We’ve got good friends here in Kansas City. Friends that I know would be there to help in any way possible if we needed them. I’ve got good work friends and a ton of Ad Club friends. But when it comes to people that we can spend time hanging around a house doing nothing, we’ve got no one.
The main reason for this is geography. Living in the far corner of the Kansas City Northland puts us pretty far away from many of our friends that live in the southern areas of Johnson County, Kansas. It’s hard to convince someone to drive an hour to come see us, just as it’s hard for someone else to convince us of the same. To a lot of people outside of the Kansas City metro, you might think that such a thing sounds absurd. It is, really. But, that’s just the mindset of a Kansas Citian.
We’ve tried to get to know other people who live closer to us. We started going to a Sunday school class a few months ago, but the group wasn’t terribly welcoming and we also could tell that we would probably be a little too liberal for some of the couples’ tastes2. We stopped going around Halloween.
We had hoped that when some new houses popped up on the vacant lots around us in our neighborhood, we’d get to know some of our new neighbors. Three of the four new houses are now occupied, and we’ve only managed to briefly meet one of the new neighbors. Our neighborhood3 is not terribly social. Everyone pretty much just keeps to themselves4.
I’m suddenly realizing that this post sounds terribly whiny or possibly even sounds like bait to get my friends in KC to say… I don’t really know what, particularly.
That’s not the point. To me, the point is, especially at this time of year, to cherish the friends that you have. Especially the ones that you love to do nothing with.
- An amazingly good drink. I’m guessing it’s a whiskey blend similar to Phillips Union. ↩
- One of the class leaders is the host of a popular local conservative talk radio program. ↩
- Aside from the duo we affectionately call “Pizza Delivery Guy” and “Shitty Truck Guy.” ↩
- With the one exception last summer when the sewer lines backed up in the street and we all bonded over our collective shit stench. ↩