it's not any surprise to anyone with access to the internet that detroit is probably a less than desirable place to be. the media really isn't the friend of detroit. i guess there is that section of the huffington post now where bougie white folks talk about what they are doing to make detroit a better place, their little corner of a city at a time or what it means to be from detroit or introducing detroit to itself. i work in detroit and i certainly don't dislike it as much as i once did however, i would never opt to live down here. i have friends who do; friends like me from the suburbs who have decided to move into the city as "urban pioneers." this very notion pisses me off but whatever. that's not actually the point. in detroit, more so than most other places i've been, "detroit" can be interchanged with not just the city but the suburbs. if i was in another state and someone asked where i was from, i would say detroit. because it's roughly 833,892,389 times easier to say detroit than it is to explain where in the suburbs i live. if i'm in somewhere else in the state, not near people familiar with the region, i'll say i'm from detroit. if they seem to have a clue of where i'm talking about, i'll indicate that i'm from a suburb northwest of the city. point is, the region, metro detroit, can be lumped into one descriptive area to people who don't know any better. and yes, detroit has it's problems. and yes, i'm not really into the city. however...if people not from the area feel compelled to slam the city/region, it's on. it's like a sibling. i can pick on it. i can complain about not feeling safe parking my car on the road or my frustration about getting gas on my way home from work. i can complain that the snow is never fully removed from the road. but you, nondescript person who doesn't live here/isn't from here, you aren't allowed to. if you do, i'll feel compelled to stick up for the city/region and probably make you look like a fool in the process.
that aside, there are some significant perks to living in the metro detroit area. we have excellent concerts regularly and they are always well attended. it's like what we do. and i am particularly fond of our radio stations, especially one of the morning shows. i listen to it every day. actually, n and jeremy do too and we talk about it while we are each on our lengthy commutes. this morning, one of the interns was talking about wanting to break up with one of her girl friends. they were talking about the ways to end a friendship, which seem to be more difficult than ending a relationship. think about it. if you were in a relationship with someone, the mature thing to do is to have a conversation and explain that things aren't working out or you don't feel the way that you used to, etc, etc and then that's the end of that. you could do it dramatically and horribly where you cheat and get caught. but with friends...people who called into the radio and the other host of the show were talking about friends they had either dumped or been dumped by just stop talking to them. so is that the way to handle this? to just stop talking, avoiding phone calls, hide on facebook and dodge everything about this person? what about mutual friends? doesn't this get weird? the times that i have dumped friends, i've done it like this. and i'm not saying that this is right but whatever. after i've already decided that the friendship is over (this means after many attempts of communication where it all falls flat and/or someone has become an intolerable douche bag) i refuse to initiate any form of communication and will limit my response. then just so that everyone is clear, i write letters. not emails. hand written letters explaining that i have given everything that i can and that i'm over it. i have found that this is similarly not really that well received; i once experienced a back lash of an aforementioned letter where the former friend decided to announce to all our mutual friends about this letter and create drama. however, we have since fixed things and are kind of friends again. maybe it wasn't that bad.
that's the thing, i don't think that there really is a good way to stop being friends with someone. it gets messy and someone gets hurt; just like any other break up. when she was asked why she wanted to break up with her friend, the intern said "because she's just different." the female host didn't say anything but both of the men hosts asked questions, mostly trying to clarify what that means. i feel like i understood her. sometimes your friends change, you can't qualify it but it's there. "she's different" said everything to me when the intern said it. she went on to explain that her friend had gotten to a point where every time they went out, she only wanted to pick up guys. a caller called in to talk about a friend being different and that was to say that she had gotten boring. i nodded along like a crazy woman when that call came through. we all change; that's inevitable. but why is that when someone changes well, differently, that it can mess up a whole relationship? i regularly struggle with friends who i think have changed and become boring. not often to the point where i want to end our friendship but it is something that uniquely gets under my skin. and i think that i've lost friends because i've gotten boring. we all change. it's what it is. it's just too bad that sometimes when you change, you lose people that you used to be close to because you didn't change together. it sucks even more because there isn't even a good way to end these things. maybe they will do a follow up segment to this mornings show where the intern will say how she broke up with her friend. i find myself dying to know.
from the girl who is getting real bummed out that it's already getting dark out.
until next time...
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