Farewell Fair-weathers

One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.

What goes around comes around.

These are statements we grow up hearing, but I find to be meaningless in reality.  I used to get frustrated by fair-weather friends, but they have become such a commonality throughout my life that I feel like I should be used to it by now.  But I feel that the notion is similar to how I tell people you can't get used to cold weather in Chicago, you can only prepare yourself better for the cold.  I feel like I've done a pretty poor job preparing for fair-weather friends.  I've had the conversation with real friends several times and I've been told that I expect too much from people, but it's only because I expect so much from myself.  Unfortunately I bought into the hype of the statements above.

When I first joined my fraternity, I can recall many times when I would meet other people that valued the bond as much as I did.  They all echoed the same feeling of expecting the bond to be stronger generally amongst at least a majority of members, but they failed to meet expectation.  These people would tend to become inactive members of the fraternity and later be asked why then didn't chose to stay active.

I'd need as many fingers as an octopus with human hands to count the number of times I have been stiffed in a "friendship."  When people visit my city, I drop everything outside of the undroppable to pick them up and drive them around touring my city.  If I'm without transportation, I catch public transportation.  When I visit other friends, the story seems to be unchanged.  I have to drive to meet up with them, IF they have time.  They would meet up with me, BUT...for a million reasons its not possible.  I wonder why I even desire friendship sometimes.  With this in mind, I moved back to Chicago to the comfort of family only to discover that the same is true with family.  I've thought about cleaning the slate and starting anew.  I've deleted the Facebook account and revamped the phone book, but its difficult to delete & forget about your entire history/past.  The older I get the more antisocial I get and the more I understand why people don't like people.


Happy New Year.