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eyelessgameThe article in the SJMN about all my friends is a fun read. Lots of random burbling about it follows, not so much fun but thoughtful.
Being one of the many friends of the tribe (as are Trip, Marith, Chrisber, Christy, Brad, Flit, Cesar, Ayse, Cdodd, Wanda, et al -- it's too late at night and I'm too lazy to make links; either you know them or you don't), it's amusing to contemplate how my life would have been different if I'd somehow tried to wrangle the family moving to Palo Alto years ago.
(And I have some claim on tribal connection anyway. My groomsmen were fellow Techers, not relatives. I had four relatives and fifteen Tech/SO friends come to my wedding in Hawaii. I understand the closeness and at some level I do share it. But not to the extent St. Francis does.)
So why didn't we move, back when we could've, like when Mike and I lost our jobs in 1994, or when we abandoned Grass Valley in 1998? Sure, there was a measure of inertia, but we could have overcome it if we really wanted to. There's also that we had to measure the social support of the tribe against this 3110-sq-ft house that costs about a third of what the houses on St Francis go for. My kids each have their own room, I have a den with my computer and we have room for all our stuff. We have a library. And I'm only in hock about twice my annual income, instead of eight times.
Still, seems soulless when you put "extra living space" up against the intimacy of the tribe, of course (I am blithely assuming that we'd actually be part of the tribe if we were in PA, not rejected or divorced from it) -- what's really important to me, things or family? Especially now that I have kids, the answer to that one is easy. And there's no question Ebeth has a better life than, say, Robert does, just from the number of different reliable adults she gets to interact cosily with on a regular basis. So one could say that living out here instead of in there deprives my kids of that better life, to the extent that an upper-middle-class upbringing can really be said to deprive anybody of anything.
But thinking about family doesn't mean not thinking about self. It occurs to me I'm an intrinsically peripheral person when it comes to circles of friends -- I draw boundaries and tend to keep them, not out of a conscious desire but out of perhaps a Midwestern reservedness I've never shed (nor particularly want to). It doesn't oversimplify St. Francis much to say that the social conventions are essentially that of Dabney House; no locked doors, drop in anytime. But I'm not like that -- on-campus living was fun, but I did after all spend half my career at Tech off-campus. I think I'd tire of living like that, and if I did tire, it'd be hard to get out of it.
Sometimes I think it might actually threaten to destabilize or fission the tribe, if we somehow teleported to a fifth house on StF today. Twenty people for dinner is a lot different than fifteen. And other than the frequent dinners, I don't know that we'd see all that much of other people. Because of our kids we'd be more tied to our house than anyone else on the block is, and let's be frank: our house wouldn't be where everyone hangs out. Lean times out in lean country is one thing -- starving in the midst of plenty is something else again.
It further occurs to me that all ten or eleven of the "core" tribe are Techers. Not a single non-Tech SO, at least at present. (Harold or Jim or Eric might cause a change in that at any time, of course, but I note that there have been non-Tech SOs before, and they haven't been permanent.) Why's that important? Well, obviously. I don't think anyone could predict how it would affect Sherilyn in the long term. She'd cope, of course -- she's always as tough as she needs to be -- but coping and being happy aren't the same thing. And all "her" friends would "really" be my friends, at some level (forget about the fact that that's spectacularly untrue, it'd still sometimes feel like it was true.) In her shoes, being part of this tribe might make me feel trapped.
So I don't regret our decision to live out here. I love my family deeply above all else, I like my life just fine, and I value and love my friends. I'm happy with things as they are.
But it still would be really cool to send my kids to high school in Palo Alto, all else being equal. It would be wonderful to have multiple trusted available babysitters, all else being equal. It'd be enormously valuable for all three kids to go through puberty with adults whom they're not related to around whom they can confide in, all else being equal.
It's the all else not being equal that's the problem.
Being one of the many friends of the tribe (as are Trip, Marith, Chrisber, Christy, Brad, Flit, Cesar, Ayse, Cdodd, Wanda, et al -- it's too late at night and I'm too lazy to make links; either you know them or you don't), it's amusing to contemplate how my life would have been different if I'd somehow tried to wrangle the family moving to Palo Alto years ago.
(And I have some claim on tribal connection anyway. My groomsmen were fellow Techers, not relatives. I had four relatives and fifteen Tech/SO friends come to my wedding in Hawaii. I understand the closeness and at some level I do share it. But not to the extent St. Francis does.)
So why didn't we move, back when we could've, like when Mike and I lost our jobs in 1994, or when we abandoned Grass Valley in 1998? Sure, there was a measure of inertia, but we could have overcome it if we really wanted to. There's also that we had to measure the social support of the tribe against this 3110-sq-ft house that costs about a third of what the houses on St Francis go for. My kids each have their own room, I have a den with my computer and we have room for all our stuff. We have a library. And I'm only in hock about twice my annual income, instead of eight times.
Still, seems soulless when you put "extra living space" up against the intimacy of the tribe, of course (I am blithely assuming that we'd actually be part of the tribe if we were in PA, not rejected or divorced from it) -- what's really important to me, things or family? Especially now that I have kids, the answer to that one is easy. And there's no question Ebeth has a better life than, say, Robert does, just from the number of different reliable adults she gets to interact cosily with on a regular basis. So one could say that living out here instead of in there deprives my kids of that better life, to the extent that an upper-middle-class upbringing can really be said to deprive anybody of anything.
But thinking about family doesn't mean not thinking about self. It occurs to me I'm an intrinsically peripheral person when it comes to circles of friends -- I draw boundaries and tend to keep them, not out of a conscious desire but out of perhaps a Midwestern reservedness I've never shed (nor particularly want to). It doesn't oversimplify St. Francis much to say that the social conventions are essentially that of Dabney House; no locked doors, drop in anytime. But I'm not like that -- on-campus living was fun, but I did after all spend half my career at Tech off-campus. I think I'd tire of living like that, and if I did tire, it'd be hard to get out of it.
Sometimes I think it might actually threaten to destabilize or fission the tribe, if we somehow teleported to a fifth house on StF today. Twenty people for dinner is a lot different than fifteen. And other than the frequent dinners, I don't know that we'd see all that much of other people. Because of our kids we'd be more tied to our house than anyone else on the block is, and let's be frank: our house wouldn't be where everyone hangs out. Lean times out in lean country is one thing -- starving in the midst of plenty is something else again.
It further occurs to me that all ten or eleven of the "core" tribe are Techers. Not a single non-Tech SO, at least at present. (Harold or Jim or Eric might cause a change in that at any time, of course, but I note that there have been non-Tech SOs before, and they haven't been permanent.) Why's that important? Well, obviously. I don't think anyone could predict how it would affect Sherilyn in the long term. She'd cope, of course -- she's always as tough as she needs to be -- but coping and being happy aren't the same thing. And all "her" friends would "really" be my friends, at some level (forget about the fact that that's spectacularly untrue, it'd still sometimes feel like it was true.) In her shoes, being part of this tribe might make me feel trapped.
So I don't regret our decision to live out here. I love my family deeply above all else, I like my life just fine, and I value and love my friends. I'm happy with things as they are.
But it still would be really cool to send my kids to high school in Palo Alto, all else being equal. It would be wonderful to have multiple trusted available babysitters, all else being equal. It'd be enormously valuable for all three kids to go through puberty with adults whom they're not related to around whom they can confide in, all else being equal.
It's the all else not being equal that's the problem.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-27 03:45 am (UTC)But maybe, just maybe, being non-techer makes those of us who are non-techer not 'really' a part of the 'tribe', as it were. Certainly, we aren't on the very connected level mentioned in that article. I, for example, floated amongst two to three distinctly different social circles within the greater Horde.
But I will say that, now that I'm back in CT and going to actual /family/ functions, a lot of the Horde parties (either on the techer side or on Merlin's side) I've been too feel very much like the large family gatherings that my family engages in (with rented banquet halls!). The biggest difference... I had a lot more connections made on a level of mutual interest in the Horde gatherings, as opposed to blood. Blood is strong, but mutual connections are satisfying.
Which is not to imply that I don't love getting to see my family, just that I don't 'fit' as well. This was all very random and rambly. Sorry. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-02-27 05:04 am (UTC)To solve the banquet hall provlem, you could just move to my neck of the woods. The neighborhood association here owns a building with a large gymnasium and a smaller meeting room, and a library which contains entirely too few of the books I like to read.:-)
Yes, more for the Garden State!
Date: 2004-02-27 07:42 am (UTC)One State to find them,
One State to bring them all and in the darkness ...
Or maybe not. Still, more people need to discover New Jersey.
Re: Yes, more for the Garden State!
Date: 2004-02-27 08:40 am (UTC)How is this new?
Date: 2004-02-27 07:37 am (UTC)I've been thinking about extended social support groups on and off lately (for reasons that should be obvious to anyone having ever been, or ever observed, a new parent), and here in Burlington, NJ Jennifer and I are part of a rather large family-by-choice: the parishoners of St. Mary's. We of course have regular large gatherings on Sunday mornings, but there are also several less formal regular social gatherings. (e.g. Thursdays in Lent there's an evening service followed by a potluck supper)
In many ways, what can be said about the Horde, Jennifer and I can say about St. Mary's - it provides nearby family, childcare support, emotional support (though that may be more a function of our priest directly than of the congregation), and regular non-work contact with other people. (This is important, especially for Jennifer who gets no work contact) It will also in the years to come provide Katherine with non-blood-relative adults that she interacts with on a regular basis, and some of the teenagers are already hinting that they do babysitting.
The one thing the church is somewhat poor at providing, that the Horde is no doubt excellent at, is people our age. Basically, there are a few married couples about 5 years older than us, then another cluster in the 40-50 range, then children younger than 18 or people older than 50. This certainly has something to do with broader sociological trends. (Jennifer used to be the youngest person attending Friday services by 15 years, by 30 if you didn't count the priest; now, she's the second youngest, because she takes Katherine with her) I do miss this contact sometimes, and start to get all nostalgic about college, but then I start to remember being able to go talk to math majors, and that just makes me downright depressed.
Of course, for a variety of reasons a church family is not viable in certain situations, and the occasionally destabilizing forces that pull on churches are legion. However, the problems of growing a church, and of keeping the church community together as it grows, are also ones that have been studied and there are resources out there that discuss church life cycles and congregation issues.
One of the things that church families have (not surprisingly) is rituals. While sometimes the rituals can be exclusionary (my mother is still not a confirmed Episcopalian, despite having worshipped in Anglican/Episcopal churches since 1975), they also help to adopt one into the community, so that it doesn't matter if you are "really" here because you're someone's SO or if you're still attending the same church you were baptized in as an infant. (I'll note that other long-lived societies also have initiation rituals, and leave the comparison to fraternities and the Shriners as an exercise for the reader) Similarly, families-by-blood have the rituals of birth, marriage, or adoption to confer membership. Jennifer is still having some trouble dealing with the fact that she is now of the Martin clan, and I have to get my head around the idea that watching football is something men do at family gatherings. It occurs to me that having one's wedding party consist of a large number of Techers ought to qualify as a ritual adoptiong Sherilyn into the group.
I do sometimes wonder how things would have gone had
no subject
Date: 2004-02-27 11:57 am (UTC)I am as well. I would rather be on the fringes of several circles than at the heart of one.