Freundin und Bekannerin
<<2003-07-16 - 12:41 p.m.>>

And I am gone so often and so easily. I'm such a slippery girl sometimes. And I don't really mean to be. I adore my friends beyond all measure. I think I tend to think that I want to talk to them and they don't want to talk to me, and so I think I set out (unconsciously!) to turn the tables.

I want to stop doing this. I was thinking on my way to Bryant Park on Monday night how much I want to stop doing this. I want to be reliable, and I want people to know how much I care about them.

It doesn't have to be about power plays. It doesn't have to be fraught with fear. I think.

I think things are easier than I have allowed them to be.

I looked at Nikki last night and recognized the things I don't like about her, and I loved her anyway. These are people that I care about, to whom I am connected in what I called, in a Hum conference about Aristotle's three types of friendship, a morality team. What benefits them benefits me by virtue of our connection.

In German, the word "freund" is fraught with meaning. You do not ever meet someone and immediately call them your friend. They are your "bekanner," your acquaintance. Then, weeks or months later—if ever, there's no guarantee, they become a "gutbekanner," a close acquaintance. No guarantee they'll become a friend. Friendship is a bond. Almost irrevocable. You are linked to your friends. You have a shared history and, almost certainly, a shared future. Your friends are the people you can't really decide you don't like—because even when they're driving you crazy, you are bound to them and they to you. You can't just cut a friend loose.

And so I looked at Nikki last night, when she was saying things that were irritating the hell out of me (she's got, I've discovered, a tendency toward irritating self-righteousness that has both political and personal ramifications), and it was suddenly so clear that she was bugging me, and that there are things I don't like about her, but that I love her anyway, and I probably always will. She's a friend. In the German sense.

And there are a few folks at Reed who I hope will be friends-in-the-German-sense, people I like perhaps more than I like many of my high school friends but am still forming that irrevocable-type connection with. Saying that makes me nervous, like I'm not sure how they'll react to it. Which is a reminder that, as they say, Rome was not built in a day. Ah, platitudes.

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