"I’ll help you be popular! You’ll hang with the right cohorts. You’ll be good at sports, know the slang you’ve got to know. So let’s start, ‘cause you’ve got an awfully long way to go..." -"Popular" from "Wicked" (the musical)
I know I should be grateful that so many people want to be my friend and that several of them are willing to go pretty far to make it seem like we are truly BFFs (keyword being "seem"), but for now, it's very frustrating. Seriously, more than two weeks before school started, three people had asked to co-host a party with me! And I'm not a planner and usually these guys aren't! If an invite hadn't gone out (with the first person to pressure me to make a decision), I think there would be more offers. Like one from the person who threw a party with me last year at the beginning of the school year. My favorite part is of course that these people like to invite others and act like hosts, except for the part where they do any work other than sending out invites and taking credit. To be fair, it's all been at my apartment, so it would be somewhat awkward to do all that much more, though I certainly wouldn't stop them!
It's just that it seems really obvious that several people want to make statements to everyone else in the program, letting everyone know that I'm their closest friend, that we have a solid bond that cannot be broken by any future events. My parties aren't that much more fun than anything else, other people live in my apartment complex and could use the pool here... and this behavior happens with more than just activities and parties. There was the game that existed my first year of grad school where I always lost as people tried to prove they knew me the best - essentially sharing more and more of my secrets to prove they knew me better. That was a great time...
I know that they don't mean anything negative and I should feel flattered, but I just think that it's much more about the alignment or group of personality types in this program. Most of them are very, very dominant, sort of alpha-females. And I am not. I'm fine with someone else taking the lead, or even getting credit for my work (as long as it's not a paper I slaved over or something big). To me, it's almost never worth fighting about and I don't want to be the leader just to be the leader. I don't like decisions. And so it's sort of that all of these people are competing to get the one sort of "follower" on their teams, thus making them the dominating force. Maybe I'm overly cynical and maybe multiple people just feel close to me because I tend to hang out with anyone and everyone, rather than sticking to one group (and so multiple people legitimately feel like my best friend and closest ally), or maybe they all just want to get into this eclectic group and get to know everyone as well as I do. Or maybe I'm just fun to host parties with.
It's just that it's surprisingly lonely being this "popular" (if I can even call it that... I swear, it's just for lack of a better word, I'm not trying to sound like a spoiled brat and the idea that this could sound like that bothers me immensely, but I want to write more than I want to be frustrated with that). Ultimately, despite the number of people calling and emailing and texting and messaging me, when bad stuff happens and I need some real emotional support, I don't really feel all that comfortable calling any of them. I'll tell them later, when the emotion passes, but I just can't confide in any of them. At least not now and I don't even really know why....
