Just got back from spending about 9 hours at friends' house playing games, sharing a meal, and generally enjoying the company of people whose company I enjoy.
I've realized I don't do this often enough, and it's a major thing that's been missing from my life since I lived in the dorms, and even more since I left Poughkeepsie. I've observed before that I'm a much more social person than I think I am.
And yet, lacking the ability to wander down the hall and bother people, or call a couple people up and try to get a game together, or a daily time a bunch of us tend to gather for dinner, or a whole bunch of semi-scheduled entertainment activities I could go to and expect people to be there if I wanted, I'm finding I have a tendency to stay at home on the computer and maybe watch TV and/or talk to my girlfriend over IM. Which I value, but it's not getting me the comfortable companionship I'm apparently really missing.
I think this is a lot of why I keep entertaining the fantasy of some sort of communal living arrangement with friends who share interests with me. If the people hanging out in my living room were people I was enthusiastic about chatting with, likely to be doing something in my living room I'd want to participate in, and interested in sharing meals and the like, it would go a long way toward recreating that sense that there was readily-available socialization around. Because I can be pretty lazy, and I miss having so many cool people around that I could pretty much always find someone if I was feeling lonely. Not that that was so good for me getting my schoolwork done . . ..
This seems to be turning more melancholy than thoughtful. Ah, well. I miss you, Friends and Family, flung far and wide as you are, and I still love you, even if we haven't spoken in a decade.