Why did I create this site?
Do you think of yourself as socially awkward? Do you wish you were better at making friends? Do zoom happy hours give you anxiety and skype trivia nights make you feel physically ill? Does it seem like everyone you know is using the pandemic as an excuse to leave you, move out of the city, and “settle down” as if 28 is the new 40? If you answered yes to any of this, you’re in the right place.
Welcome to boopingabout.
I’ve never been great at making friends or keeping friends. I’ve never even been one to have much interest in talking to people in general. When I do talk it is generally a sarcastic comment or an attempt at sardonic humor. An inherent distrust of other humans has always just been there – coloring all of my interactions. Seriously, if I were to identify a motto for myself, it would be “I hate people” – a refrain I literally repeated non-jokingly probably thousands of times from my childhood onward. I should note there does exist a small number of people with whom I am comfortable being myself and sharing my actual thoughts and emotions. I would like to offer a sincere congratulations to the members of this elite group – what a monumental achievement. But even those special few I don’t speak with particularly often. On numerous occasions I have attempted to examine why I am this way, and I have some pretty good theories, but I don’t want to bore you with my self-psychoanalysis.
In recent years, however, I have found myself (albeit on rare occasion) actually craving human interaction and wishing that I had more people to talk to and even confide in. Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age or I had a revelatory encounter that I can’t pinpoint which changed my perspective and caused my heart to grow three sizes that day. Regardless, it became apparent about this time last year that something had changed in me. Even my 2020 resolution was to proactively work toward forming more meaningful relationships. And I was off to a pretty promising start I thought, but then March rolled around and San Francisco went into a complete lockdown.
I attempted to adjust to the “new normal” – video conference happy hours with friends, watching the same movie at the same time and talking about it after, virtual trivia, even a remote escape room. But quickly the novelty of it all wore off and I realized going on this way was not sustainable for me. I have always found phone calls and video conferencing to be significantly more uncomfortable and physically draining than in person conversations. I have never had a phone call not end awkwardly. If anyone else knows how to properly end a phone call without feeling weird about it after, please let me know. My father is similarly socially awkward, and his solution is to just hang up on people without saying goodbye once the necessary information has been conveyed or obtained. I’ve tried this a few times and it has not gone well.
So I was back to not having any way to satisfy my occasional desire for human connection. And even when I did occasionally speak with friends and acquaintances, I found I was having less and less in common with them every time. While being confined in lockdown was actually stoking a fervor within me to travel, adventure, and go to really disgusting dive bars as soon as it was safe to do so, everyone I knew was getting engaged, married, buying houses in places where I would never visit, remodeling the house they bought before the pandemic…you get the picture.
With literally nowhere else to turn, naturally, I’ve decided to open up to complete strangers over the internet in hopes of finding connection. So if you are out there thinking, “I need a new friend since all of my old ones left the City to buy a house in the suburbs of some state that they had never been in before but they heard from their brother-in law who heard it from his co-worker that it is a nice place to raise a family” (or something along those lines) …welcome. I’ll be your friend.
