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PrintFinale: A friendly experiment
Illustration by Mario Noche.
It’s just after 9 o’clock on a Monday night and I’m waiting for a stranger to come through the door of Club 185 in German Village. This stranger, whoever she is, will be my friend for exactly one hour. I’m not positive who I’m looking for. I have a name, Sofia, and a snapshot photo from an e-mail. I order a Bell’s Two Hearted Ale and wait.
As of mid March, I had 1,191 friends. Facebook is keeping track. I know what the captain of my high school’s football team was doing last night. My T.A. for biology freshman year keeps inviting me to his slam poetry readings. And a random Spaniard tells me how much she likes the pictures I’ve posted of my Halloween costume.
But are these people my real friends? And why exactly do I feel the almost compulsive need to keep track of the little corners of their lives, clicking through the pictures of their new dogs and reading the quotes they’ve posted to their profiles?
These questions got me thinking about whether we’ve made friendship a synthetic thing—something that doesn’t really have the emotional weight we’d like to think comes with real human relationships. So, doing the logical thing, I went to Craigslist.
My ad was simple. It asked if anyone would be interested in hanging out and talking about nothing in particular. I’d buy them a drink, no strings attached. It seemed almost pathetic, a grown man asking if there was anybody in the Greater Columbus area who wanted to be his friend. Would I come off as just another creepy Craigslist poster?
By the next evening, I’d received 16 e-mails, including seven or so men who asked me for naked pictures of myself and one fellow who took the extra initiative to send me one of himself. I read though Sofia’s first e-mail casually. She seemed tame compared to the others, saying that she’d quit her job and was going “stir-crazy.” And she could meet at any time. Good enough for me.
So on the night of our rendezvous, while I’m waiting with my drink, Sofia comes in the side. She is younger and shorter than expected and dressed like a well-put-together post-collegiate girl. She slides onto the bar stool next to me and offers her hand.
“Hello, Alex. I’m here to be your friend.” Her voice is sweet and thick with a Filipino accent. And, for some reason, I begin to panic, thinking this is perhaps one of the worst ideas I’ve ever had.
The next hour turns out to be the opposite of bad, however. We talk easily, learning we share similar interests. She just graduated from Ohio State and is living in this recession-induced limbo of no job, trying to get by on money saved from a recent bartending gig. She says she’s considering moving back to her native country, the Philippines. I nod and listen politely. I tell her about how I’ve gotten into a few different authors lately. She nods and listens politely. She tells me that she took a rite-of-passage backpacking trip though Europe. I say I’m jealous. I tell her that I’m headed to South America in June. She says she’d kill to do that.
The rest of the hour is like this. It’s nice. It’s surprisingly comfortable. And I’m a bit relieved since I had entertained dark thoughts of being kidnapped and killed in a back alley so that my organs could be harvested on the black market.
I finish my beer and ask her what she thinks “friend” means in America. “Well, here in America, it seems that for all the stress put on the importance of Facebook and Myspace and Twitter, people just aren’t that friendly.”
“What exactly do you mean?”
“Everyone here is about plugging their ears with iPods and walking with their heads down, texting. In other countries, people talk in the streets. Pleasantries, small talk, but it adds up. The newspaper boy becomes a family friend; the guy who walks the little dog past the cafe every day becomes a friend. People just go for it. Here, Americans don’t seem to believe in that. We are obsessed with ‘friends,’ but in a strange way.”
I prop the door open for her and we head outside. She’s right. Maybe we are going about things a little crooked. Facebook is like collecting baseball cards. It’s not the same as meeting the real deal. While Facebook makes things easier, it also makes things more complicated.
So, it’s unlikely Sofia and I will become forever friends, laughing over “Gilmore Girls” reruns and eating popcorn in our pajamas together. But I probably will make her a Facebook friend.
Alex Kinsel is a freelance writer.
