Times are changing

It has been a rough month. School has hit its stride and demanding a lot of my time and attention. The last month my mind has been racing evaluating school assignments and thinking about my career. With grad school nearing an end (6 months!) I've been thinking about what my thesis should be (still undecided, but getting closer to a topic) and what I want to do in general. After what feels like a month of stress, I have decided to quit my job at Carmichael and go to a different agency in Minneapolis. My job will remain relatively similar, but I will get the chance to work with some new people on an account that really interests me and also aligns with some things I've been studying in school (go figure). This has been one of the hardest decisions I've made in a long time. Marriage; easy, job change; agonizing. I have a lot of friends at work now, and I think that made it all the more difficult. But ultimately, I needed to think about what was right for me and not what was right for me and my friends. I am only moving down the street, so ideally I will still see them around town. But, let's face it, everything is easier said than done.

Okay, I've been working on a paper for the last 12 hours and I'm still not done, so off to finish and hopefully also get some sleep... Sleep is overrated anyway.

One sided

How hard is it to keep up with friendships? We have all the resources in the world, but I don't think we put in the same effort. How great was it as a kid to get a letter (the kind with a stamp) in the mail from a friend that had moved away. It took genuine effort to keep friendships going. Now, we can just stalk in the background and know what's happening, but not interact. I was have a face to face conversation with someone about social media and how great it can be and he asked, "how does it get people to interact in person." Honestly, I was a bit stumped. I didn't really have an answer. I threw out some examples of people who interact on twitter and then made an effort to meet in real life. But he was ultimately talking about twitter/social media taking away face to face time, it does. If you feel like you're already connected, do you need to go out of your way and actually see someone too?

Ask almost anyone and you can easily find out that I am a fan of most social networks, but my question is when does it become a replacement for a good [old fashioned] email? I had a friend last week send me a linked in message (I'm pretty sure he has my email?). Despite that we were able to connect and in person lunch together.

I have a friend from high school that we used to always call each other on our respective birthdays. This year, we both resorted to facebook wall posts instead. For me it is hard to go from a more personal form of communication to a less personal form. If I used to always call you, why should I know facebook? If we used to talk via email, why another source instead?

This brings me back to the reason I started this post. I checked my sent items to see when I emailed a friend of mine, we don't talk often, but we email sporadically. I realized I emailed him over a month ago, no response yet. Which then made me realize that someone emailed me last week that I haven't responded to. I can't get mad at others for not emailing me back, when I'm doing it to someone else.