emilystrange wrote:school - where you learn to interact in a society. one of the main and most important things we teach.
making friends. keeping friends.
school is never wholly about academia. never has been. gaiman is partly talking out of his arse.
Tell me how many highschool friends you are seeing nowadays on a regular basis.
People make new friends and ditch most of the old ones every seven years. I don't find that very surprising, really, when looking at my own entourage.
The only people I talk to frequently from 'those days' are a) 13Vision13, a very good friend, b) my brother-in-law who was in the same year with me and had the same interests re music and roleplaying games and fantasy books and c) a girl from my class I actually could not stand but has married herself into Kaats family tree so I HAVE to talk to her from time to time.
I have rediscovered a lot of my old classmates on FaceBook, and at first I was really happy about that. Why? NOT because they were still that cool and nice and crazy, no because it made me think back about my schoolyears, which were a rather pleasant time for me.
After a few weeks I 'hid' almost half of them from my Facebook page again, because they did not have anything interesting to say anymore.
They all sent me stupid quizzes with poor grammar, sent me pictures of their dawg and were very pleased that 'today I painted a door and now I'm going to get a well-deserved evening off'...
Today, I think only four or five remain on FB, because they do interesting stuff (one does poetry and music, the other one travels far and posts splendid pictures).
TBH, the most interesting people I've met are those I did NOT see at school but at gigs I did, concerts I frequented.... in MUSIC, as it were, a community where people really help each other because they have one common goal.
Am I talking like a weirdo Lazarus now, just a bit?
IZ.