Cultivate a more diverse circle of friends

I think I can go about doing this my entire life, but I’m happy with the friends I have now. I will of course love to expand more on people with different interests. I met a great writers group online (through Nanowrimo.org) all around the world (I’ve met about 6 of them in person). I’ve become incredibly good friends with a few and feel like one of them is my long lost sister or something. I have a couple of theatre buddies I can go to everytime a new play or musical comes up and my other friends don’t want to go because they still revere the cinema and not appreciate theatre. I have some very adventurous friends in regards to outdoorsy stuff, some very adventurous in finding new beaches to visit, some in terms of eating new foods, and of course, there are some that aren’t too adventurous but have other charms.

I’m moving to another state in 2 months and I hope to meet more people! :) Especially in the arts field, I’m surrounded by “pracical-majors” people – like business or nursing.

I just loved seeing so many people from all different walks of life connecting. I could still take this further, and I will continue to do so. But I’d say my original intent has been met, so I am marking this as done.

In the past year I have made some good progress here. Sadly some of my oldest friends have continued to move out of the area. This has created the need for new friends and also the time to bond with them and share some meals.

I also spent last year in Bakersfield on business where I was thrown into a scramble to find buddies just so I didn’t go stir crazy. This resulted in some budding friendships and one lifelong bestest friend for whom I am very grateful.

Remember how firendships in highschool could run so deep. Partly it was all the time you spent together and partly it was all the life changes you both were experiencing. I still feel that bond with my highschool buddies. Sadly, they live in different parts of the state now. I had thought that without repeating adolescence and without committing that much time, friendships like that were a thing of the past. I was wrong. My new best friend is just as deeply connected. Sadly she lives in Bakersfield and I am 2 hours away. It does make me look forward to visiting though. I could never say that about Bakersfield before.

I attend a small, private university that is made up of predominantly white, middle- to upper-class Christians aged 22 and younger. The ironic thing is the school is in LA County, one of the most diverse places on earth! I’m going stir-crazy here with the lack of different perspectives. As soon as I graduate (and it will be soon), I plan to be more proactive about widening my social circle.

I used to live in a neighborhood populated mostly by young white hipsters. Today I took advantage of the spring weather by working in the yard, and got a chance to meet many of my new neighbors, including: several African-American families with young children, a Latino family with young children, an Indian family, a white lesbian couple with a teenage son, an elderly woman living alone, and an elderly couple with strong accents I couldn’t place (I’ll have to ask them their story another time). What a rich neighborhood I live in—I can’t wait for the block parties!

than it is already.

I cherish each and every One for their Uniqueness and unfathomable Value as they each play their part in this Life..

Best wishes to all in your Quests…

I grew up in a small town in the Midwest where there was no such thing as diversity and I found it incredibly boring. Now I have, (and have had since I moved away to college), a very diverse group of friends that I hang out with. Come to think of it, I have diversity in just about every way imaginable—gender (both men and women) sexual preference (both straight and gay), age (from 20 to 68), level of education (from a 10th grade education to PhD), religion (from atheist/agnostic to Christian, Buddhist, and Muslim), linguistic and cultural (every ethnicity and language under the sun), and occupational (from doctor to teacher to lawyer to massage therapist to engineer to flight attendant to opera singer). It’s really great having such a diverse group of friends because it’s a constant reminder that there’s more than one valid way of viewing things.

The problem is you all live a very long ways away. I don’t really beleive in travelling (its the pertoleum thing) to keep friendships current and my favorite way of putting the “deep” into a relationship is sitting around fire. That ain’t gonna happen on e-mail.

So that leaves me with the population of folks who already live around me. Many people my age have gone off and made babies and made baby friends. Others who were great friends have been priced out of the local real estate market and gone off to buy houses in the hinterlands.

Friendships are easy once there has been some critical mass of interaction, but I really have no clue how to get over that initial hump of social chit chat to sift out the folks to go deeper with.

Not fun for my guest. Sure, Minnesota is still something of a Scandanavian stronghold and all-white gatherings probably aren’t uncommon.

But that’s not what I want for my life. I don’t want to limit my life experience and my relationships to people who are very much like me (in terms of age, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, lifestyle, religion, education, etc.).

At this moment, however, although I am friendly with a large and diverse circle of acquaintences, most of my inner circle are a lot like me. I’d like to reach out and take the chance to let some other kinds of people in. This is my small and personal way of healing the distance between people.

And if and when I ever get married, I’d like the gathering to reflect a much richer diversity.