May 08 - Blurred Lines
By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga
The lines of friendship are a little blurry; and no, this isn’t a comprehensive review of the Robin Thicke song.
We all have friends. Friends from work, friends from school, friends from Dusk, and even friends de toda la vida; the kind of people we don’t know why we are friends with and sometimes cringe at the thought of it, because Tom is a complete racist on Facebook now. Now, the problem is in determining how much of a friend people you know are, because moving into adulthood you need to learn to bring definition to these blurred lines.
De toda la vida
I have so many of these. In this category you can stick people that you’ve known forever, since nursery or first school. My suspicion is that in Gibraltar we tend to have more of these than elsewhere because your lifelong friend also happens to be your mum’s best friend’s sister’s son’s boyfriend and that’s a link that’s real. These are the kind of people that you can experience a friendship with in a couple of ways: They are either the guy you never see and when you do it’s at 3am outside the casino and you promise to meet up and never do; or the guy you never see and when you do it’s at 3am on Speak Freely saying things you can’t really tell if they’re jokes or serious comments, with your suspicions being reinforced with a two second stalk of their profile where they’ve got plenty of racist material.
The problem with these people, these friends de toda la vida, is that you can’t get rid of them. They became your friend by default, just because you were in the same room for a couple of hours a day, and they went to your birthday parties and you to theirs, and they know your mum and you got your cheeks pinched by their granny; but realistically nothing else is tying you to them. Very few of these types of friends graduate to better positions. But sometimes you feel a certain closeness to them that follows you all the way through life.
De la escuela
Our school system in Gibraltar makes it possible for friendships to go all the way. You can have a friend de toda la vida who was in your class in nursery, first school, middle school, comprehensive and then when you thought you got rid of them you find them walking out of the library in your university. It’s possible. Of course this category is all a little vague, because you’re in school from age four up until you go to university at eighteen, which means you come across a lot of people.
But let’s ignore first school, because those friends are still from the previous category, children at that age aren’t thinking for themselves and it’s all part of the parents’ plan for world domination (or best child contest). Middle school is when parents start letting their children be a little more independent; and you start to figure out what your likes and dislikes are. By middle school you’ve realised that not all sport is football and you start to move away from those people you thought had to be your friends and all of a sudden you have a group of close friends with whom you start hanging out with on the weekend. In my case it was kicking a ball about, listening to nu-metal and going to the old Queen’s Cinema; for kids these days it’s probably sitting in silence together staring at phone screens pretending to be adults. But however you do it, these are your friends de la escuela, forever.
De una pila tiempo
Somewhere between the time you’re a child going into Bayside and Westside and the time you’re going off to university there are three or so years where you make a bunch of new friends. Or at least that was the case for me. I had my friends from middle school but the pull of rock music was too strong and before I knew it I was in a band, had long hair and my group of friends was made up of people, my age and older, that I had never hung out with before.
These friends are possibly the most important of all. They’re the ones with whom you do a bunch of ‘firsts’ in your life, your most formative years. Being a teenager is difficult, especially in Gibraltar and especially when I was a teenager a decade ago, so having a good group of friends is important. I spent a lot of this time playing music, taking photos and drinking beer, which is all you need as a teen, realistically. Unless you have a falling out, which between men isn’t very common (unless you’re a wild animal-man that can’t be tamed, not even by law) you’ll cherish these friends for the rest of your life. They are the people that you tell people in university about when you first move in with five random English students, scared as hell. And because life post-university is pretty monotonous and boring you’ll always remember these people who are linked to a bunch of stories of a time when you didn’t have to worry about anything other than getting home on a Friday night. (Note how I didn’t have to worry about losing my phone on a night out, because I had a brick, these days if I don’t feel my iPhone in my pocket my lower back becomes a sweat slip-n-slide and my mouth a desert).
De uni
Different people have different university experiences. Mine was pretty bland, I went there, did what I had to do, didn’t do much else and came home four years later with a degree and still no clue of what I wanted to do with my life. This meant that I didn’t really meet many people in my first two years of university, beyond those in my course that I would see every day. But now, university friends are a little different, you can experience friendships of all kinds, from those that are like de toda la vida, that you can meet up with three years after your degree has ended and still be the best of friends; to those that are more like de la escuela or de una pila tiempo, where you can think “okay, we were good friends in university but I’d rather not stay in touch, see you or even think of you because it makes me nauseous”. You either get the best aspects of lifelong friendship or the worst aspects of short-term friendships.
For some people, like I said, it works out better than for others. Some people just can’t get enough of their university friends, meeting up with them and talking to them on the regular even five years after parting ways after graduation. The one advantage you have with this category of friendship is that you are ultimately in full control of the situation: deleting their phone number from your phone and blocking them on Facebook is extremely easy to do, if you want to break ties; but you can’t delete Nicky from first school from life. The reality is that at some point in your life, whether you attempt to get rid of Nicky or not he’ll appear in the form of the person behind the desk at the tax office, or the guy that comes around to fix your TV signal. And not to mention the fact that you’ll see Nicky from first school every Christmas Eve, drunk like a skunk at 4pm outside the Royal Calpe but you will never see Dylan from university again IN.YOUR.LIFE.
The detachment you can have with these friends is refreshing, they are disposable and it’s nice. It’s what you need when you’re trying to get by being a piece of shit human for the first couple of years of supposed adulthood. Having said this, if you manage to navigate the waters correctly you can end up with a handful of very good friends for life, in all corners of Europe, and with all sorts of backgrounds and professions, which is nice; all the while retaining your group of friends back home for the holidays. And in the case that you don’t feel like being an asshole, that dude you lived with in your first year of university and haven’t spoken to since will slowly stop appearing on your Facebook feed and you’ll stop interacting with him until one day (after you’ve wiped him from your memory) you see him comment on something and it reminds you to delete him. Nobody will notice, nobody gets hurt.
Con una mano
Finishing university really changes things around. There’s a strong chance you’ll keep some of your close friends from before and during university but there’s even a stronger chance that as those friends continue their studies, or move to a different country, you end up finding new ones. Now, I know I said your friends from your teenage years are possibly the most important of all, but these friends you keep and make after university are the ones that help you the most. They’re the ones that’ll sit down for hours at a pub complaining with you about politics, jobs and the prohibitive prices of property and how you’re meant to become a functioning adult in 2018.
The most important thing of all, when you reach this stage in your life, is coming to the realisation that friends aren’t like Pokemon, you’re not trying to catch ‘em all. You notice that to get by you only need a few good friends, friends you can count con una mano. Because it’s difficult to adult. It’s hard to try and fit everything you need and want to do around work and still hang out with friends. But you make it work like adults, you change lying in bed hungover all Sunday for waking up early and spending the day in the countryside and Friday nights are more often than not a midnight-in-bed kind of thing rather than midnight-at-the-club. Your priorities change as you grow older and you start to care less for the people that don’t want to admit this and more for the people that ride the wave with you. Once you’ve got to this stage you’re set. You’re open to meeting new people but at the same time, no thanks, you don’t need ‘em.
Bonus Round: No se quien es
I don’t know if this happens to everybody, but there are people I say hello to on the street ALL THE TIME; but in most cases I have no clue who they are or why one of us said hi to the other, in 99% of cases I don’t even know their name. I like to think I’m sociable but I’m not that sociable so I really don’t understand how I’ve ended up knowing a lot of people with whom I would never go out for drinks with (that’s how I measure friendship, apparently). But the reality is I know a bunch of these ‘friends’, and here’s the problem: I’ll be out on a night out and see someone that always says hello and all of a sudden before I notice I’ve been speaking to them for half an hour and bought them a drinks. So is this person my friend now? It’s like the lady I see and say hi too every morning, is she my friend now? I think this kind of ‘friend’ only appears in your life in adulthood, mostly just at random but sometimes out of convenience. It’s convenient to be friendly with the guy from a shop, and speak to him when you see him out, but please don’t get the wrong idea, I don’t need any more friends right now.
Friendship is a weird thing. Making friends can be equally as easy as it can be complicated, and at times you don’t even notice that you’ve become friends with someone until they’re telling you how their wife hates lasagne (which is crazy). Of course everybody has their own experience of friendships but the reality is that as human adults we really don’t need more than a handful of good friends, of meaningful relationships, and if you really have to stop and think whether somebody is your friend or not chances are they’re not really your friend.
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