Heather called me today, excited about having used the blue pen. The blue pen is mine, you see. Well, it’s an indicator of my social activities. She has a nerded-out, color-coded calendar system that she keeps meticulously updated. You can ask her about any activity for any person in our household and she has the answer on that calendar. And duplicated in Google. But don’t ask about softball, unless you have time for a rant about improper scheduling techniques.

Back to the blue pen, because it is mine. And it does not get used much. I don’t socialize often. It’s not that I don’t miss my friends; I do, and very much. I’ve just not been good about keeping up on those relationships.

It used to be easier; I worked with my friends. At my previous job, I made friends with real and actual people (not like you fake internet assholes). When I moved to my current job, a previous coworker had gotten me the interview. He turned into my skate buddy, but has since moved on, and I haven’t even bothered to text and say, “Hey, let’s go skate tomorrow.”

This is the point where I need to not dwell on the horrible person that I am. Things were easy, and now they’re not. I’m only just realizing how much I need those friendships. I need to work for them instead of just being at work for them.

I heard a simple method for helping to keep a friendship active on a recent episode of Back to Work. Set repeating reminder for yourself to setup a lunch with your friends (or a phone call, if you’re into that sort of thing). The host uses a “6 week” rule. I’d like to try for something a little more frequent than that, so I will. This sort of specificity makes a good candidate to replace something vague on My List.