As Mark pointed out to me, it’s probably rather strange to pick for your Best Man someone who you’ve seen only three times in as many years. But although some small part of my brain insists that some time has passed since I left university, it’s easily overruled by the rest.
I mean, graduation was about four weeks ago, right? And Joseph’s about three weeks old. Wait, what? Three years? Does not compute.
In that time I’ve made some friends, it’s true — and don’t get me wrong, they are good friends — but seeing someone once a week, or once a month, just doesn’t register in my brain as strongly as do those I lived with, even though the time I lived with them was long ago.
To my shame I’ve spoken to those University friends less and less as time has gone on. The majority I don’t even regularly IM anymore — we’ve become Twitter friends, Facebook friends, people who comment on each others’ blogs. I feel a strange kind of buzz talking to any of them, even just over IM, but yet I barely do it. I bash out a 140-character reply to some tweet of theirs, and my need for contact with my best friends is sated for another few hours. Normally I don’t feel too guilty about that, but sometimes it hits me that I’ve been doing that for four long years, and then, as now, I realise just how bad that is.
So yes, it’s really bloody strange that what I think of as my best friends, and my Best Man-to-be among them, are really those friends that I talk to the least of all. But having isolated the cause of that as my own reluctance to start instant messenger chats, at least I have something I can work on.