Christmas time is coming

The past few days have been busy, stressful, frustrating, and various other emotions that are not always negative, but often are. A combination of work-related stress due to long hours and high pressure, and social frustrations. I would write in detail about a few stressful things that have happened recently, but I see that as pointless a waste of energy, so instead I will recognize those negative emotions, and then let them go. I have been enjoying the Buddhist podcasts lately.

Since coming into (something which vaguely resembles) adulthood, I have never found myself overly pre-occupied with Christmas. I recall that during December of my Junior year of college I was traveling through the south of China, and I was only vaguely aware when it was Christmas: a lack of westerners around combined with being immersed in a culture to which Christmas is still fairly foreign made me not realize until partway though the day, and at that point not care. I was in XiaMen at the point, and a stroll on the beach, kicking Jianzi with Zhang Hui or a climb up to a local temple seemed much more interesting to me. Most years, what I felt around Christmas time boredom of being away from school and friends combined with an impression of (what I saw as) a fairly artificial presentation of affection and gift giving (why not give presents at other points of the year to show your appreciation without having a social pressure to do so?). Conversely, I am finding myself strangely preoccupied with it this year.

Christmas is this weekend; It is a strange feeling, but I am suddenly (somewhat desperately) getting in touch with people to try and set up plans to spend time together with other people this weekend. I am suddenly and unexplainably very averse to spending this weekend alone. Logically, it's not horribly unusual for me to spend an evening without going out: although I often try to go out to a music show or a theater event or something, it sometimes happens that my Friday consists of getting off from work, having dinner, reading and writing, watching a movie and going to sleep. Likewise, sometimes I find no interesting events going on for a Saturday and I can't get in touch with a friend to go out dancing, so sometimes my Saturday is just going to dance class in the afternoon and chilling at home for the evening. I feel that there is a big social pressure against spending time alone like that (I recall back in college mentioning to someone that I watched a movie and I was asked "who did you watch it with," as though it wasn't even considered that I would watch it alone) I am pretty okay with spending an evening alone in my apartment. I don't want every weekend to be like that, but neither do I feel the necessity to avoid that kind of weekend completely. In fact, I sometimes yearn for it when I feel overwhelmed with other tasks. However, that doesn't change the fact that I have felt a great need to make plans with people for this weekend.

A side-effect of my chosen lifestyle as a globe trotter, a world traveller, a citizen of the world is that I am far away from family, the people that Christmas is normally spent with. I am also far away from most of the friends that I have met throughout the recent years of my life. Indeed, I hardly know anyone from my high school nowadays, and I believe that if it wasn't for Facebook most of them wouldn't even know that I still exist (and vice-versa, if I must be frank). Communication with friends from college has been minimal: I send out updates to some close friends every now and then, and maybe 15% of those get some kind of response. I try to keep in touch with those people, but lack of responses makes it seem like I am the only one that cares about keeping a relationship going, which is super demotivating. One way or another, I am most distant from those people than I perceive others my age to be. Of course, all the other foreigners in Beijing are in the same boat, so I can;t really justify my whining by that line of logic.

I haven't been a hermit in Beijing though! Between juggling club and improv I have met quite a community of fun energetic people. Some are just acquaintances that I see regularly, and some of them are friends whose company I enjoy immensely and want to grow closer to. Since I obviously am unable to spend Christmas with family, friends from high school, or friends from college, it is this group that I am looking at. Some of the people I enjoy spending time with the most (Dave, the Brit who plays in a pirate-themed rock band, and Fede, the Italian juggling master or Beijing) are out of town for the weekend. I would feel it most like a family setting if I could sit down for an evening of meal, conversation, and general merriment with one of those two and their social circle. Perhaps the fact that they are a bit older than me would make it feel more familial, more like a legitimate Christmas dinner.

That being out of the picture, I have begun searching for companions in the young fun crowd that I hang out with at music shows and other events. They are all students, though, and being students I suspect that they have on-campus connections that I lack. I think back to when I was a student here, and I certainly knew loads of people from my classes. So far it seems that those people have other plans for Christmas with other friends, and as a group I am not a part of I'm not sure how comfortable I would feel pushing myself into that. I certainly have co-workers, but none of them are very close friends. I don't think I would feel comfortable spending the holidays with co-workers, nor would I enjoy it. 

Actually, if I can't get together with any of my young and fun friends for the weekend, I think I will just spend my time reading, applying for the Spain program, eating pizza and watching movies. I have no less than seven books that I plan to read before June, and I have finished a total of one of them in the past five months. Not to mention the movies that I have had since mid-way through my Senior year of college. A dozen Spanish films, a dozen more English language movies, and a dozen more in other languages, some from India, some in Korean, and some a mish-mash of European languages.