create a tight knit community of friends

My family and I are moving for my new job. We need to pick a new place to live somewhere in Chicago. Makes us wonder who we’ll live next to…I’m sure that I’ll keep in touch with 2 or 3 people from Colorado. I love my friends and having friends in different places is fun in its own way…it just misses a couple things that would otherwise help us be a “tight community.” (It seems odd that the only 2 other people with this goal also live in Boulder!)

I feel like my family and I need to first settle on our “forever place.” Then work on the friends thing from there—makes such a big difference if you live close to one another. My closest friends are in L.A. but I don’t see living there.

So I read this article about a study done recently, they found that Americans on average had one less close friend than they did twenty or so years ago. The average person 20 years ago had three CLOSE friends, now it is two. I still need to read the actual study, which isn’t that long but I can see this happening. I can feel it happening to myself everytime I hop on the computer and surf the internet for hours at a time, every time I scroll through my phonebook and shy away from calling most of the people in it, every time we can hardly get enough people together to play capture the flag or frisbee golf.

I know that most people like to “do their own thing” most of the time and I am definitely in that crowd. Every so often though I wish my friends would like to do more things than sit around and watch the TV or a movie. I know a lot of activities cost money but we have found things to do that don’t cost a dime, save for start-up costs of course.

I don’t know what I’m getting at except that maybe I wish I felt like I was more connected to my friends, the world, and some community that I could consider myself a part of.

I think this also connects to “being a better friend” and checking up on people on my myspace/facebook from time to time.