Friendship is hard. There's all sorts of weird work you have to do to maintain it. And then factors like distance intervene and things get exponentially harder. Heck, I was not able to maintain a distance relationship over a paltry 30 miles separation. How are you supposed to even deal with real distances involved?

I spent a month in the summer of '90 in Germany with my friend Jens. See how easy that sounds? Jens had spent a month with me earlier, and because we were two completely different people, we had done all sorts of stuff that I would never have got around to before. Why would I go exploring skate shops? It would never occur to me to go hunting for All-Stars. We went fishing, for heaven's sake. I never fish, and yet found it surprisingly fun. Jens was maybe a year older than me, but he was way more grown up. With his smoking, girl-chasing, über-blasé ways, he was all George, I was worse than Lenny. What're ya gonna do.

And he and his family both were very nice when I was in Germany with them. We took trips, they fed me well, Jens showed me around, gave me my first introduction to driving a stick in his Opel on the beach, we took a trip to the North Sea for a long weekend in a cabin with a few of the other exchange students (why oh why were all the german girls in our group so unspeakably hot? That perplexes me still. Is it a national constant? I haven't been back to Germany to find out). We played foosball, they had coffee vending machines in the school hallways, and he introduced me to the concept of backup girlfriends. Like I said, very different, much cooler than me. Me, Lenny, drawling, "I like pretty things, George."

And then I came home, and we pretty well drifted apart. We sent a couple of mails back and forth. Disappeared for a few years. Then Jens sent me another mail late in college. Then we disappeared for a few years. Then Jens looked up my email address and we traded a few emails. And I haven't heard from him in maybe four years.

Yes, he gets all the credit for making the effort to keep in some sort of touch. But he's so far away. And we remain such different people. And the time we had together was unique and cool, but so very long ago. Really, the strongest bond is the feeling I have that we ought to be friends after all the work we put in and all the distance we covered to visit each other's countries.

I feel guilty if I'm not going to be his friend. What was I doing wasting our time?

Granted, it's been five years or whatever. He's long gone. God only knows where he is now or what he is up to. But every now and again, I find myself wondering where Jens is and what he is doing.

By the same token, every morning I wake up and wonder where I am and what the heck I am doing, only with a significantly higher degree of urgency.

So yeah, friendship is hard. Should it be work? Should I be allocating a certain percentage of my energy to maintaining friendship? Or is real friendship indicated by the very fact that it is something effortless? Shouldn't friendship be something light as a feather that actually lifts you up instead of requires you to slave to keep things updated?

I have no guilt whatsoever about ditching my boring friends. I just wonder if I'm doing right not doing the work to hold on to the periphery friends that aren't boring, but are different or distant or both. Good people, difficult circumstances. Good people, not great people. Yeah, great people I'd sell my kidney to keep in touch with. If B~ and J~ really find Oregon and California better places to live than Seattle (how can that be! ), that's cool. It'll work.

Okay, blah blah blah. Sorry about the self-indulgent rant. Greetings to Jens Õchlich (umlauts added just for fun), wherever you are.