Friend Drought
On making friends in a new place
At the time of writing, I’m at The Cannon, a bar about a block from my apartment in New Haven, Connecticut. I came out here to finish edits on a conference paper, but I have lost all will to make any more changes, yet about a third of my beer remains. Consider this writing to be in the tradition of Myspace Notes.
After over half a year in New Haven, a town across the country from my home institution that is the University of Oregon, I am coming to terms with the fact that I will have to put in more work than I am doing now to build a community and find some friends. I like to think I’m pretty good at making friends, but this self-perception has been challenged by the difficulty of making friends without a pre-established community in which to make them in. It is much easier to develop friendships with folk in your department or fellow union members than it is to create relationships out of the ether that is impersonal adjunct labor.
For my non-academic readers, I currently work as an adjunct instructor. Adjunct instructors are the Über drivers of higher education: we are part-time workers who teach the majority of classes at many institutions. Since we are part-time, we often work at multiple universities, we do not get health benefits (never mind retirement), we often do not get work for a third of the year (summer), and roughly every four months the chance arises for our employers to fire us without cause since we are only ever hired four months at a time. But for the purposes of what I’m talking about, adjuncts aren’t usually included as part of the university’s academic community. So everywhere I’ve ever worked, adjuncts show up to teach their classes and leave. We don’t see our coworkers, and given that university websites are always out of date, it can be impossible to even find a coworker’s email if they even still work at the same place.
I am lucky: without slipping into hagiography of my employer, Fairfield University treats its adjunct workers better than the five other universities I’ve worked at. Due to some shenanigans, I am actually not an adjunct from now until August: I am a visiting instructional professor, so I have benefits, a decent wage, and teach four classes instead of the six I was teaching last term. I might have some chances to meet my coworkers and develop friendships there.
Otherwise, friendships are not baked into my daily life, and since I’m not a member of a climbing gym or a trivia team, there is no obvious path to making IRL friends here in New Haven. I have no lack of NIRL (not in real life) friends such that my heart usually feels full: I am very grateful for the friends I remain in touch with across Oregon, California, and elsewhere, and there are also the rich friendships I’ve made across Twitter that are as surprising as they are heartfelt.
I think that there remains a material importance to having friends in town you can go do an activity with: drinking, talking, walking, and so on. I am at a definite lack of those, and although I think I could start cultivating some, I feel that the activity is not so distinct from attempting to raise a wild plant in a pot while knowing nothing about said plant. It may turn out to wilt and die after two months for reasons unbeknownst to me. It may never take. I may take some clippings and leave them in some water without the thing ever putting roots down.
I write from a position of luxury: I have friends to talk to through technology (Freud and his writing on the telephone be conditionally damned), I have a wonderful relationship with my partner Emily, and I live with a dog and cat who are emotionally complicated beings. Yet if only for appearance’s sake, I feel the lack of two or three friends I could text to get a drink with and argue about something with. Things are going well.