An email I wrote to Jenn Chen today about the perils of new friends.

Oh, the "new" friends -- how I dislike them.

Here's the thing. We have all moved away from what has been, for the most part, nice little nuclear families of friends that supported us through adolescence. From boarding school, to college, to the final wobbly steps we took towards a semblance of adulthood in the late 90's. I'm still trying to puzzle out whether or not the show "Friends" reflected that moment in our lives, or actually informed it. I think because of the radical increase in divorce rates that happened during our childhood, many of our peers learned that the only relationships you can count on are the ones you are in charge of. Granted, I did not come from a "broken home" but I think that there was something in the air regardless. The fact of the matter is still to this day I get way more excited over my friends from 1987-1991 then most others. There are a few truly great exceptions, and they are notable and divine, but for the most part I have spent the last three years reconnecting with my old friends and doing some aggressive editing of some people I picked up along the way between Choate and now. Terrible? Sure. But there is that moment that you see that your "new" friend may in fact look at you more as of a competitor than a confidant. It's just so tricky with us "artistic" types. The self-esteem game is already way too treacherous without supposed friends telling you all about their horrible day without either offering consolation or at least wildly inappropriate tips on dealing with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that has brought you down to the benthic levels of pathos that lead you to dial the phone to talk about your terrible day to being with.

In other words, "new friends" are just looking for a way to make you feel shitty.

I don't know why, but they just seem to. Like the "new" friend I made in New York who, occasionally, would find ways to make me feel incredibly self-conscious (a nice way of saying he made me feel shitty) about being broke. Or the "new" friend in Los Angeles, when I was expressing how I was still recovering from the death of a friend, chose that moment to tell me how disappointed she was that I didn't go to her birthday party because apparently grieving was not an acceptable excuse to give her shindig a miss. Not even kidding. I mean, for social reasons, and to make the connecting friends' lives easier, I don't believe in massive blow-outs unless its warranted, but when someone shows their true colors repeatedly and horribly, I decide to move on, stop returning the phone calls and chalk it up to experience.

RE: pitching/waiting for repsonses to pitches.

It sucks. Big time. I know the song you are singing. There is no way around it, currently. But if we chuck it all to write our novels, there is the problem of paying the rent in the meantime. I am trying to sort that out in my head myself. My current solution is to think a lot about what I want to write, and what the schedule is that I want to do it on. As in over the next few months and years. I've made my geographic schedule i.e. New York for this long, then L.A. then blah blah etc. I just forgot to put in specific career ideas in that schedule so now I have to do that. I hope some of this helps. I'm posting this on Sucktime because I am too frazzled to write anyting else today.