"Me? What would we do?"
"Yeah. I dunno, we could play with LEGOs, or maybe you can bring your Transformers over. If its nice, we can take our bikes out."
"Ok, sure."
And that was it. It was simple. What happened to those days? I used to have what I thought was a small (read 2) close knit group of friends that we vowed to keep that tone even as we grew up. We graduated college, got jobs, and we still said that ambiance wouldn't be corrupted. We went out of our way to preserve it. One of my friends came up with the idea of "Friends Night Out." Which I thought was the dorkiest thing ever.
"Here me out," he said, "I'm trying to carve out a little time where we can keep things like how they were. We can get together, hang out, shoot the shit. It'll be great."
Of course, great ideas are usually only great in theory.
We had scheduled it on thursday night to 1) Not interfere with any potential plans for the weekend and 2) because we'd like to pretend like we started the weekend early.
The first few "FNOs" were chill, but somehow we started scheduling them at fancier and fancier restaurants much to the chagrin of one my friends girlfriend, since she was pissed he wasn't saving his money and spending it on her. Also, scheduling them after work was not conducive to hanging out. Everyone is just reeling from the stress of the week and none of us got our dream jobs out of college, so there was a lot of "welcome to the real world" angst/rage. Things started to begin to unravel after that.
First, they wanted to bring their girlfriends, which I was fine with, except, one of them could give a rats ass she was there. The only reason she was there was because she was completely dependant and couldn't have my friend out of her sight. The other, she couldn't even be bothered to hang out with us because it was Thursday NIGHT! MUST SEE TV! She was a big Friends fan, so yes, she'd rather stay at home and watch a group of actors on tv pretend to be friends rather than go out and make friends.
Thinking back now, why the hell were the girlfriends even there? Both my friends had girlfriends that had nothing more than superficial relationship with their friends. They didn't respect what we were trying to preserve and all they saw was just more reasons to piss away time and money.
I realized though, we were trying to preserve something that passed its expiration date. Hanging out required NO schedules, and here we were trying to fit it into our workdays and responsibilities that have suddenly sprouted now that we had fend for ourselves. Hanging out also didn't require a happy hour, it didn't require a cute girl asking if you would be needing a table for dinner, and it didn't require to leave tip after all was said and done.
I saw this line whilst blog surfing yesterday:
I had one of my first real "grown up" moments the day I realized that there really are only 24 hours in a day, and I had to choose very carefully how I wanted to spend them. - Wil Wheaton
And he's right. We didn't realize it at the time but we were trying to have our cakes and eat it too. You can't be a kid when you're grown up because that just essentially makes you a bum. But we wanted to be kids and still be adults too.
So life was kicking me in the ass to tell me we were growing out of having all the time the world and we were growing out of each other. We had became different people, with different goals, and yet we still clung to the past. It was something we thought was real and not muddled like our lives were at the time. But with every "FNO," was another nail in the coffin with our friendship. For some reason, it accelerated the death of my childhood friendships. We were grasping at sand, and we knew it was a matter of time that it would all slip away.
I don't have a close knit circle of friends these days, I guess they fall by the wayside once you grow up and have too many responsibilities to attend to.
Hanging out has become a rarity to me these days. Sure there are dinner parties, dinners out, happy hours, but that's the thing. Hanging out is based on not having anything to do at all and enjoying it. Having to create an activity to facilitate it, somewhat kills the purity of it. At the same time, trying to enjoy boredom now is like trying to watch old school Transformer cartoons now and thinking it that it does have an incredible story arch and amazing special effects. I guess I grew out of it.
I'm lucky though, because I am able to still experience it sometimes with the few friends I have that get it, with my wife, and sometimes with my family when we're not driving each other nuts.
