Boring Life Things

I recently expressed my appreciation for Michael Underwood to Michael Underwood. I'm about to do it here, too. If you know Michael, you know he's a great guy. An enthusiastic talker. An active listener. Very intelligent, but still humble and quite funny. I appreciated Michael's friendship for 4 years at Willamette, but have grown to appreciate it even more while living in Malaysia.

You see, time zones are a thing and people have schedules and need to sleep sometimes, so it can be a challenge to talk to friends as often as I would like to. That means when I get a chance to talk with friends, there always seems to be an unspoken expectation to speak of Dramatic Life Things. Death, moving cities, existential life crises, your most recent heartbreak, the 50 ways to leave your lover, the meaning of life, etc. While those topics are important and I am more than willing to discuss them (and I promise this post is not to complain about talking about such things with you. I enjoy talking about those things with you!), there is still the strange expectation to only have deep conversations after days of playing phone tag. It's as if we think we owe it to modern technology to have a life altering conversation every time we talk to someone on a different continent in a different time zone.

I explained this to Michael the other day, and I told him I appreciate that he ignores this expectation. Talking on the phone with Michael makes me feel normal which is something I usually wouldn't really want to feel but it's nice to feel while I'm an outsider in my current community. The opportunity to talk about Boring Life Things like the joys of eating an entire loaf of good bread, bowel movements, my internal rice vs. noodle debate, etc. is refreshing. To this, Michael paraphrased something someone famous once said (I don't know who, let me know if you do):

We have the tendency to brush aside the little, unimportant things in life. Yet, what makes life meaningful is the constellation of seemingly meaningless things that add up and define our relationships, homes, careers, hobbies, everything.

In our conversation about appreciating Boring Life Things, we reached a conclusion that I would categorize as a Dramatic Life Thing. And it's so true. Our best friendships are those that celebrate and ponder all things on the spectrum of Life Things. Our lives are consequences of the innumerable tiny choices, interactions, and other instances that add up and define us. I want to get better at celebrating those little things and I recognize it's probably all my fault that it feels like there is an expectation for long distance phone calls to consist of only Dramatic Life Things. Either way, I've been Lonely here with a capital L, so feel free to call or message me and tell me about your Boring Life Things. Dramatic Life Things are also welcome. Let's catch up about it all, friends. I miss you.

P.S. While this is an appreciation post written specifically about Michael, I also want to say thank you to all my friends from home who have gone out of their way to keep in touch or even just check in every once and a while. You know who you are and you seriously rock!

Shout out to Michael and all my other lovely friends
who are down to talk about Boring Life Things!