Social Development

My roommate Shaun was a restaurant manager when I moved in with him, but I had hardly gotten to know him by the time I left a few weeks later.  When I returned, he had quit his job, and was focusing on screenwriting, which is basically being unemployed.  He had a girl around a lot, who I somehow never got properly introduced to during the transition, with Ben and camp, but we never really directly interacted anyway.  She had a kid, who was about six, and they visited frequently, but Shaun and I lived fairly separate lives in our own halves of the apartment.  It wasn't until much later, after I had moved out, that I came to realize that they had been together for years, and that that was actually his kid.

The previous year, I had spent nearly every weekend back with my friends at the university.  Now that I lived in Hollywood, the campus was twice as far away, but most of my friends had graduated anyway.  A couple of them had moved on to grad school, at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena.  So became a lot more familiar with Pasadena as I went to visit them frequently.  We were regulars at the $3 movie theater near the school, seeing pictures a few months later than everyone else.   I also had done a much better job of staying in contact with my friends from camp, than I had the first time around, four years before.  The advent of Facebook was of course helpful in that process, but beyond that, I was much more deliberate about that.  I correctly recognized them as my future social group if I intended to eventually move back to NorCal, as opposed to people I was probably never going to see again.  And who knows where some of those relationships might lead?  I had been very much single for a few years by that point, and while most people at camp were much younger than me, I was much more interested in Christian girls who survived working at camp in NorCal, than I was in SoCal girls who had never seen dirt, and spent too much time drinking and such.  Although I had made numerous friends that summer, there were two girls that stood out in particular.  H was not someone I would have considered my type, especially since she was a few years younger, but she appeared to be interested in me, and had clearly gone out of her way to get to know me at a deeper level that summer.  I greatly valued her friendship, and tried to keep an open mind about the future.  I didn't know P nearly as well by the time summer ended, but I had enjoyed the conversations that we had together.  We had grown up with similar backgrounds, had a lot in common, and knew many of the same people.

That fall, shortly after I returned to LA, while I was hosting a BBQ for my friends at my apartment, I got a call that my uncle had been killed in an accident on my grandparent’s farm.  He was my youngest uncle on either side of the family, and his daughter was only three or four years old, so it came as quite a shock.  I had just returned from my trip home, so after discussing it with my parents, it was concluded that there was no need for me to come back up north for the funeral.  Looking back, this was probably a mistake, but you live and learn.  The importance of being there for family members should not be under estimated.