Can I just say that I'm so excited about my new team at work? Things got shuffled around a bit, and I ended up staying with my old manager, but with a new group of people. The job is the same, the manager is the same, the pay is the same, but I switched over to a different group of coworkers. And they are so nice. Unbelievably nice. One woman, who is some sort of de facto den mother for the group that puts even my RA-ish tendencies to shame, gets flowers for all the girls every single week, apparently. Even though I haven't switched desks and so am not sitting with them yet, she came by yesterday with a lovely arrangement of autumn-colored flowers. I was amazed and delighted.
Honestly, people really do make all the difference. Not that my old team wasn't nice, but it was missing that spark (or it was missing a den mother figure to engender that spark). And I've found time and time again that it doesn't really matter the conditions in which you're living if you are living with people you consistently enjoy seeing. Of the four facilities I lived in in college (well I guess it was really only two, since three of my years were in FloMo), Castano was technically the most beautiful, but it was my most miserable living experience. And Coachella, for instance, was an absolute hellhole and there were so many apt comparisons to concentrations camps in the camp where we slept; but, it was one of the most memorable and enjoyable experiences of my young life because the group I was with was so outstanding.
Family is so important to me, probably because I had a really strong one, and so I feel this deep desire to make sure that everyone else has a family too. I feel like that's been my underlying motivator for most of my social actions and interactions...my friends tend to be aware of and become friends with my other friends, mostly because I'm the type of person who finds it perfectly normal to go to a movie with fifteen people. All along, I suppose, I've rather unconsciously been trying to create a tribe, in an effort to combat the modern atomization of society. It's like the sourdough starter in the 'Little House on the Prairie' books (Katie at least will know what I'm talking about)...in the books, Ma brings a bit of unbaked sourdough with her to the unsettled wilds, and she can use it to start new sourdough loafs by always saving a little piece of it back after letting it rise. Laura thinks she has lost it, which would be a disaster, but then she finds the piece under the doughboard, and order is restored. Anyway, it's like bringing a small seed of family, community, whatever someplace, adding the proper ingredients, and letting it rise of its own volition, in an effort to combat the inherent loneliness of 'civilized' life.
Not to say that the tribes I now belong to are my doing, since it's been proven repeatedly that I can be just as much of a destructive agent within groups as I can be a connector. But I've always been fascinated by how groups form, exist, and sometimes die, as well as individuals' roles within them. Mostly, though, I'm just excited to continue to hang out with people, and continue to encourage these bonds. At the end of the day it's probably selfish--I do want other people to be part of a nest in a trust tree (to quote 'Old School'), but the other reality is that the more friends I have, the more likely I am to find a few who will survive and thrive despite my strange moods and weird relationship-destroying tendencies. It is strange that I sometimes feel a compulsion to cut everyone off despite my obvious desire for tribes and families...I guess I don't like to rely on anything or anyone, and the closer I get to someone, the more uncomfortable it makes me.
Speaking of, I got a massage today at work; it was just a chair massage, not a table massage, and it was sorely needed (har har) because my neck has been bothering me lately (to the point that it woke me up the other night and I felt physically ill when I tried to turn my head). The massage only cost me $5, too, which was a great perk. Anyway, the point is that I found it impossible to truly relax. I guess I don't tend to relax anyway; maybe it comes from the fact that my feet rarely fully touch the floor unless I scoot myself forward or point my toes down, or maybe I'm just naturally tense. But I just couldn't handle having a stranger touch me. I'd get super tense, then I'd tell myself that I was being stupid, and I would forcibly think about relaxing, and my muscles would start to relax, but then my mind would be all revved up wondering what was wrong with me, why I didn't want to be touched, whether I was some sort of freak for not really liking massage as a pampering relaxation technique rather than a necessity to work the pain out of my neck...and by the time I pulled myself away from these self-loathing mind tangents, my muscles would be all tensed up again and I'd have to start over. Grr.
So yeah as usual my thoughts on this matter solve or resolve nothing, other than to say that I like my friends and would be quite happy living in a tribe for a long time if I were convinced that the members of my tribe would behave smartly and avoid getting committed or married to people who cannot be part of the tribe. It's also essential that tribemembers not move away, and that's already happening. So, I may have to take my sourdough starter and move someplace else, and begin a new tribe. Although honestly, the older you are, the harder it is to find solitary members to join a tribe, and the tribes in existence probably aren't as cool as mine. They definitely wouldn't understand mafia, or slap the boob, or staying up 72 hours playing taboo, or the opium lounge club, or the race of joseph (current population: 2, plus random unofficial members), or eating thanksgiving dinner under a computer-generated sign that just says 'thanskgiving,' or sitting in 100+ degree weather dry-heaving while having the best time ever, or playing the cooked or dirty game. And if people can't understand any of that, they're really not ideal members for the tribe.
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