[30/M] a humble request for eternal friendship
No stress, no strong commitments — just looking for a penpal I can chat with every two or three weeks, for the next 20-40 years. Isn't that what everyone's here for?
Recently I've been listening to the Beatles a lot. For no particular reason, I just got sick of my old playlists and thought "I've never really listened to them, I should find out if they were good." I listened chronologically by album, and supposedly the last song they recorded together was George Harrison's 'I Me Mine'.
It's actually a pretty bad song - it begins well but descends into a very generic white-man-blues chorus. Still, the title and theme is evocative. I Me Mine. The egomaniac's refrain. Why do people want penpals? Are they desperate to know about other people, other countries - or do they want to talk mostly about themselves? My experience penpalling has mostly been the latter - as in, I usually struggled to talk about anything but myself. The blank page tends to encourage introspection and reflection, but I've come to realise a penpal is not a diary that occasionally answers back. There's a bit of responsibility involved, to be engaging and not merely confessional.
If we write to each other, I won't tell you about my daily routine or what I had for dinner or why I feel bad for skipping the gym yesterday. I read a lot of books and watch a lot of films - we can discuss those. The people in our lives - who are they, what are they like, what do they mean to us, do we really even know them? What's your house like, your neighbourhood, your town or city? Where's a place you like to go? Perhaps it doesn't make sense, but I'm interested in writing little essays to each other where we learn about one another indirectly - instead of saying "I like going to the gym", we would write about how the gym smells and feels and what it's like to be there. Instead of saying "I watched Lawrence of Arabia last weekend", we would talk about a particular aspect of the film - like the fact it begins with 4 minutes of music to a black screen - to talk about attention spans and patience in the 21st century (the people in the cinema were VERY uncomfortable with the lack of immediate stimulation!)
I prefer email only as I've downloaded this app only to write these posts and scamper off again — reddit has become exceptionally good at delivering a dripfeed of aggravating and inane content, and is best avoided. I live in Australia so snail mail anywhere would be slow and I'd need to get into the habit of duplicating my letters — when I last wrote letters consistently, I usually didn't understand half of my friend's response, because they were responding to me and I'd forgotten what I'd said. I'm not against snail mail but only as a supplement to email communication, as I'm interested in building a solid friendship and don't want to send letters into the void.
You can look at my profile for other posts I've made that do a better job at advertising 'Why talk to me'? Of course, there's really no reason to advertise, because I will be avoiding talking about me. There are far more interesting things in the world. Let's talk about those.