People like to say that the world has gotten much smaller and they’re right, they don’t just say because it sounds thoughtful.

Letters that would have taken months to deliver and to respond piss us off if they don’t send in the first six seconds. E-mail, phone calls, text messages. I don’t need to give any examples, you already know. It’s Almost too easy.

It’s so easy to keep in contact, but god, it's so simple to not. Every now and again life likes to remind us that the power of proximity is still alive and well, despite our flailing against it. Even with our little tools, even with our ingenuity, the best way to fertilize your relationships is still by being in their space.

Now, I want to be clear, this is not some indictment of technology. I try to keep my curmudgeon to a minimum. I agree that we’ve opened so many new doors of communication with smartphones and the internet that are so exciting and so strange, and If that helps you, then absolutely use it. Who am I to tell you how to use your Vine account? I’m not going to yell at you and tell you to hurl your phone into a ravine. We can admit, that would be very dramatic and a bold move for your weekend, but I’m not going to officially recommend it.

Really, what I’m trying to say here, the venting, the steam being let off, or whatever your prefered metaphor for pockets of air being released is, is that i’ve been at college for six and a half weeks now. Six and a half weeks and I’ve spoken to my friends back at home.. maybe once? I’ve talked to and seen one of my very own brothers, a literal next of kin- zero times. As in not at all. There were stretches of time over the summer where I saw them every day. Have I been back home in that time? No. But I shouldn’t have an excuse, right? Not when I have a mobile computer in my pocket all day every day.

I’m pretty close with my brother, at least I hope. So having 20 miles in between us extinguish our relationship in such a short amount of time frightens the hell out of me.

At my old job we would make friends pretty quickly with co-workers, you know, through mutual disdain of being 20 and being told by a four middle aged folks to stay in one space for eight hours and represent some company. But anyway, we would make these friends and then after a couple weeks or months, they would leave. They would find something else. And we knew that most likely, that friendship with Todd was pretty much over. As soon as we stopped being with them all day people get distracted by, I don’t know, their lives.

So we made new ones. And that was fine.

Now I thought that when I left for school, I would lose touch with some friends, but I’m not sure I realized how fast it would be and how easy it would be. I’d been on the other side so naturally I would neverrrr do that. You never realize how quickly and easily we substitute.

I haven’t spoken to my brother yet as of this transcribing. I’m not sure if I’m writing this to coax myself into calling or if I just needed to put words to something and acknowledge it. Probably a bit of both.

I wish I could finish this with a proclamation of “HARK! Call your friends and family that you haven’t seen in awhile!”, and maybe you should. But hey, at the very least we’re in on the joke.