Video Calls

This is how clueless I was before self-isolation but I now totally learned something. Also, I had a really hard time choosing an image for this text and very little time, so.

---

Self-isolation seems to have led people to acquire all sorts of new skills. One of my new skills is to look at my friendships through a magnifying glass. Is it a useful skill? Probably not. But it has made me appreciate my friends even more than I already did, and I mean all kinds of friends (this will be important to keep in mind as you read through this stream of consciousness). So, maybe it is not less useful than learning how to make sourdough bread? Because there is only one thing in life more important than carbs: friends.

I have friends whom I don’t miss during these times when nothing happens. I know that sounds tragically mean but it, by no means, diminishes those types of friendships. I believe that these are friendships which are not just based on common interests but in fact exist purely around those common interests: we both like spicy Thai food; we both like to dance to 90s Hip Hop in packed clubs; we both like to reminisce about our childhood while getting drunk off our asses in the same group we’ve hung out since we were pre-teens. Those are all valid things to have in common and valid reasons to uphold and care for a friendship. They are reasons, however, that are inherently tied to activities and, thus, they are reasons that fall away, once we can no longer do the activities. I don’t think this means that these friends are insignificant or “worth less” than other friends. It just means they are a specific type of friend. The type of friend whom, when we can’t do what we usually do, I don’t think about -- because it takes me a while to miss them: it’s not like I’m still doing the thing, just without them. I’m not doing the thing and so I’ve lost -- for now -- that connecting point to the friendship.

I guess this can also be a chance: To see if there are deeper, more base connections with the people who used to be “casual” friends. Most often, people are casual friends out of habit and not because we have consciously decided to make them that. Maybe, the person I text when I’m in their neighborhood for work and don’t want to get lunch alone has many more interesting thoughts than the “what have you been up to since I last saw you?”-stories we normally exchange. Actually, they probably do, we just never got around to talking about them. But then again, I don’t think that we need to change those friendships either: they are valuable just as they are. But let’s not forget to check in on those friends. The good thing is: for these friendships, a text exchange or a card in the mail usually does the trick.

And here we have the reason why I’ve even noticed I have different types of friendships in the first place: video calls. I find these exhausting under the best of circumstances. Even worse are voice-only-calls (what we used to call “calls” because you use your vocal cords to communicate…): I can’t see the person, I have strange reactions and -- most tragically -- my eyeballs have nothing to focus on so I am super distracted the entire time. But now these calls (of all kinds) freak me out even more. When I have them with people who are in the friendship group I so eloquently elaborated on above, they feel like work. It’s so hard to keep coming up with things to talk about if you cannot comment on each other’s outfits, spy on the people at the next table, chat about the movie you just saw or try to figure out what to get for dessert together.

But then, there are friendships who don’t need any of that outside input at all. And, I hate to admit it, that’s one beautiful realization for which I also have to thank video calls! I first noticed this when I spent yet another call with a close friend of mine, in which we spent more than an hour talking about books exclusively. Nothing else. It wasn’t even all about books we were currently reading. It was much more general and yet essential: what makes a good story, what books needed to be longer and why, how do we read (which one of us skips over descriptions and just reads direct speech?).

And it made me realize: This friend is somebody I connect with on an incredibly deep level. Even when all types of outside inputs fall away, even if we have not much to respond to the question “what have you been up to?”, we still care about what the other thinks and we still have things to talk about because the things we have in common are not based on changing circumstances but they are values and ways of looking at life that will always be part of us, always important to us, and always up for debate.

I am not saying that these are friends who agree with me on everything -- far from it. But these are friends who happen to care to debate the things that I care to debate. They are friends who, when they disagree with me about an issue, I need to know why they think differently. Not even in order to convince them of the opposite (although I do like trying that), but to understand what makes them think the way they think: What makes them who they are, to understand them better, to love them for where they came from, how they got here, and where they still want to go.

So, I guess this is really a love-note to the video calls from hell: Thank you for letting me know that I have different friendships in my life, that they are all valuable in their own right, and to actually pick up the fucking phone when a friend is calling: I might be surprised how much I can enjoy this. Or much more genuinely: them.