Burn Bridges

Rule Number 10: The key to winter break is knowing your rotations

I know it's been a long absence blog-land. You're tired of me coming home and immediately showering before getting in bed with you. You miss my warm caresses. You wish our relationship was as tender as it was in the beginning. You miss the days of flowers, long-winded holiday cards, and poorly constructed analogies based off kitschy romantic comedies that we pretend to love. Well it's time to take it back to another level. I'm re-upping my vows, baby. So grab your third-date panties, I'll put on some Al Green, and we'll get this rolling.

Being home for the holidays gets weirder every year. I'm sure someone has devised a complex equation for how much time should be spent with certain categories of friends, but I find myself wandering in the dark many times. The key is knowing your rotations of friends and how to manage them to maximize the amount of time spent with people you want to see. But before we dive too deep, let's go over a few quick categories of people you might run across over your winter break.

The best friends: These are the people that you always hung around with in high school. They're the first ones you call when you get home, and likely the only ones that you keep in touch with while at college. This is the group that not only deserves most of your time, but will likely get it. Because frankly, who wants to manufacture a deep friendship in three weeks when you already have the people who have known you for, in my case, around nine years ready to welcome you home, drink vodka out of a plastic bottle with you, and laugh their asses off when you drink too much (because that's what real friends do). On a side note, for those of you who have seen me drunk at school...just know that there is no comparison to how trashed I get when I'm with the people who have known me my entire life. I literally cannot embarrass myself. Or so I think. But I digress.

The periphery friends: These meetings usually involve one time getting coffee to catch up on all the things that you won't follow-up on in the next few months. The meetings typically last for a couple hours, come in between days where you have big plans with your primary group of friends, and end in hugs and promises to keep in touch. Which you usually don't do. I'm just as guilty of this as most, so I really can't judge the ethical consequences of maintaining peripheral friendships. But the carrying capacity of good friends in one town seems to be around 6 or 7, and everyone else has the occasional coffee date status. Someone from the periphery might slip into the rotation of close friends for one specific break, but after college the peripheral friends tend to stay the same, just as the close friends usually don't change. That said, there's something to be said for a peripheral person who can slip into your "hang out every few days" winter break rotation. This is less likely in the first few breaks after starting college, but I've noticed in recent years that I'm beginning to re-connect with people who have grown from periphery friends in high school into people who I could see myself hanging out with much more often. Let's face it, people change. There's no sweeter feeling than upgrading a peripheral friend and seeing him/her more often simply because you get along much better now. This is perhaps the most exciting part about coming home for break.

A sub-category worth mentioning: the peripheral friend to whom you are suddenly attracted. This is a tricky category to work with over breaks. On the plus side, you won't see the person very often in the future, so there isn't too much to lose. On the downside, you could be sacrificing a periphery upgrade candidate for a casual hookup that will likely lead to a little weirdness because frankly, everybody knows every embarrassing incident about almost everyone in their high school. I've never seen this category work out successfully, but I do see the unresolved tension between some friends. It's...charming.

The ex-girlfriends: This is particularly relevant for me, since every one of my ex-girlfriends is from the Bay Area. As such, I run into many scenarios in which I have to weigh my desire to re-connect with an ex. On the surface, these meetings are no different than meetings with peripheral friends. Except, of course, that I didn't used to hook up with my peripheral friends. The question that always has to be asked when deciding whether or not to see an ex is "why should I bother?" Because seriously, why put yourself through the awkward catching-up phase with an ex if you plan on going back to school and not speaking afterward? It seems that every break, I manage to see at least one ex. The encounters all go well, and I come out of most of the meetings feeling pretty empowered about my past. That said, it's hard to keep in touch with exes, and illusory connections over break can be broken very quickly when each person goes back to his/her regular life. The jury's still out on whether this is ever a good idea. I maintain that it usually is, though I can't explain why I bother.

The randos: This category is reserved for the "friends of a friend who went to a different high school," the "guy I don't totally remember being in my History class, but is now offering me a beer at a party" and the "people I wouldn't say hello to if I saw them in the same restaurant as me." I won't spend too much time here, since nobody likes bumping into randos. But I will say that if you see me at a party, don't know me well, and I'm in the mood to run with that, you could be my best friend for a night. I suppose random re-connections can be kind of amusing.

The difficulty in coming home for winter break (and summer, to an extent), is that there is really no room to progress in any of these categories. No matter how much you connect with a peripheral friend, you will still go back to not seeing him/her for months, and the person will likely fall back to the periphery. The same goes for close friends. You fall quickly back into a close relationship with these people because you've known them forever, but the relationship is usually a regressive one. New things are not tried and progress is not made, because everyone is aware that regardless of how much closer you get to another person from your hometown, you ultimately have to leave again. Depressing as that sounds, though, this is counterbalanced by the fact that because these people have known you through your formative years and have grown up in the same town, there is more shared knowledge between you. It's much easier to fall back into old ways and keep up close ties with friends from home who have common ground with you. No matter how much you change or how far apart you move from your home friends, you can always reminisce on the time that so-and-so did something stupid in P.E. Health class or such-and-such happened at Junior Prom. It's human nature. The paradox of the situation is that the people that nature deems you to be closest to are also the people who you will see less often than your other friends.

Enter my pop culture reference. I was listening to a song by Dom called "Burn Bridges," which triumphantly declares that "friends that you trust probably know way too much, you should just love em and leave em." As if that wasn't enough, the chorus says "burn bridges, make yourself an island, just forgive em and forget em." And when I say triumphant, I mean triumphant. Generally, the prevailing philosophy on friendship is that you should avoid burning bridges as often as possible. Then again, prevailing philosophy probably seems like a buzzkill to stoned twenty-somethings in Connecticut writing dreamy surf rock. The concept is interesting though. What if burning bridges can be a process of conquest and cleansing? Each time I come back home for a break, I find myself contemplating the point of maintaining the relationships that meant so much to me in high school. We are stagnant in our suburban nostalgia. We frequent the same haunts and find ourselves discussing the same insufferable gossip which we loved four years ago. We are living, breathing fossils when we come back home.

And yet I still think there's a point. A wise person once described a friendship to me between her and one of her best friends. They only see each other once a year and rarely talk when they aren't together in person. Yet once a year they get together for a weekend and everything flows back easily. The friendship is as strong and vivacious as any that she experienced in college. Without many questions asked, the friendship simply works. The glass half empty person would look at coming home as a fruitless quest to recapture the past. The glass half full person, though, takes stock of these various groups and puts them within a picture of both the past and the future. Like a basketball coach handing out minutes to his players, we all come home and work our rotations so that we can see people that we still love, people that were important for their own peripheral ways, and people who we once loved but still need to learn from. Perhaps I only say this because I am terrible at burning bridges. This is the first winter break, though, where I haven't been trying to light any new matches. I'm just rolling with whatever Walnut Creek throws at me. So far, so good.