Thinking about Halloween parties

Friends are easy to come by when you're younger, but harder the older you get.

Halloween is coming up, one of my favorite holidays. When I fist moved to Hanover, before I moved downtown, I had a big Halloween party every year. Even when I hardly knew anyone, I invited them to my party. The party was part of my larger effort to make friends and build community, something I’d figured out doesn’t happen so easily as you get older.

Friends are easy to come by in college. You’re all living together, eating together, going to classes together. I went to college nine hours away from home, so it was sink or swim as far as making friends. Graduate school wasn’t that much different. I didn’t live in a dorm, but I shared an apartment with friends and still spent a lot of time with other people in my program.

It wasn’t until I took my first job at a small college in Birmingham that I realized making friends wouldn’t always be so effortless. I lived in an amazing apartment in a very cool part of the city, but it was a fifteen-minute drive from campus. Unlike at Hanover, none of the faculty lived close to campus, but were scattered all around the city.¹ I was the only new faculty person in my department and the only other person close to my age was married and newly pregnant. There was no new faculty orientation program that would have made it easy to meet other new people, I think because I might have been the only new person that year.

In that one year, I drove to campus and taught, then came home to my really beautiful apartment where I watched at lot of Turner Classic Movies and Tennessee Titans’ football games…alone. I think if I’d stayed in Birmingham longer, I would have found my tribe. A really interesting couple lived below me and I did find a small group of young, single professors who got together for a happy hour. But then I got the job at Hanover and I was on my way out.

When I came to Hanover, I was determined not to make the same mistake. I would be intentional about building community and making friends. I’m not an outgoing sort of person, but I had to act as if…act as if introducing myself to strangers was no big deal. Act as if hosting a Halloween party and inviting people I hardly knew was just what I did.

I was lucky in that Hanover was a very different sort of place than the college I’d been at in Birmingham. A big chunk of the faculty, including me for the first three years, lived on campus. There was a cohort of new professors and a new faculty orientation that made it easier to get to know each other. People were welcoming and open and gracious enough to come to my party. I made some good friends and felt part of a community.

It’s almost twenty years later now (Really? What the hell?) and some of those friends have come and gone. I’ve very much shifted my community from the college to downtown Madison, which is a good and perhaps healthy thing to do. I have many good friends and still make new ones, even in the middle of a pandemic. Some sociological research suggests that it should be harder to make friends in a small town like Madison, with everyone closed off and suspicious of newcomers, but I don’t find this to be the case at all.

What’s more, in Madison, I have a friend group that’s quite diverse in some ways. I have friends who are older or younger and friends who do very different work from me and friends who are single as well as partnered and friends who are gay.² This is fairly rare thing in a country that’s segregated along so many different axes³ and a big part of what I love about living in Madison.

There are a lot of things about Madison that make community and friendship easier. People walk, which leads to a lot of spontaneous interactions that are less likely when you spend most of your life in a car. There are actual front porches and side porches in Madison, which also lead to random conversations⁴ that don’t happen when your house sits way back off the street, hidden behind landscaping. Then there are all the local hangouts—coffee shops and bars. Fair warning—if I see you more than three times in my local bar, it’s likely I will be introducing myself. I’ve met some of my best friends that way.

We’re not having a Halloween party this year. A Halloween party needs to be fairly big to work—something about safety in numbers when you’re in a weird costume—and we’re not quite back to big party comfort levels yet. But next year. Next year a big party to celebrate friendships and community, which have made even the last two years more than survivable.

Thanks to all the new subscribers! Getting so close to 100 subscribers, so keep sharing and liking and commenting! Thanks as always for reading and keep scrolling for the big news I promised!

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The big news!

I’ll be teaching a series of Winter Writing Workshops in Madison! Flier with all the details below. You can buy your tickets here and use the promo code YOUTHINKFALL21 to get $5 off your first ticket. Classes are small, so get your tickets fast before they’re gone!

1. No one lived close to campus and looked at me like I was crazy when I asked because the neighborhood around the college had become predominantly Black over time. This isn’t at all just a Southern thing, but it is a messed-up phenomenon, a little island of whiteness and privilege plopped down in the middle of a Black neighborhood. When I taught urban sociology there, I took students out of the campus gates and we walked around the neighborhood and it was the first time these students had ever done so, even though some of them were seniors. This is the power of race—that these mostly white students were either on campus or in their cars driving to another part of the city to do all their shopping, drinking and fun. It was like the neighborhood around them didn’t even exist.

2. Though when I was making my list of friendship diversity, I totally forgot about the whole “I have gay friends” part, because, one, it feels like a weird and mildly gross thing to say. “I’m not homophobic! I have gay friends!” Yuck. And two, it feels like that should not be a big deal in 2021. I mean, who cares? I spend more time thinking about the white-ness of my friends than I do thinking about their sexual identity. At the same time, I realize that some people very much do still care. So.

3. The U.S. is segregated by age (and becoming increasingly so), race and social class, just to name a few.

4. One of my favorite random porch conversations—an older man who pointed out the bunny rabbits in his side yard, who he’d been feeding, along with some chipmunks. He was quite concerned because he wasn’t quite sure what the chipmunks would like to eat.