I do not know

Ok, I guess I should toss out one of those graduation posts. Everybody seems to be getting sentimental about leaving college, and I can see why. After all, it is unlikely that most of us will ever return to Chicago, or see the people here again. It is quite unlike Singapore or wherever you are originally from, where after graduation it is fairly certain that you will return to the scene of the crime and see your co-conspirators again, to drag a metaphor out too long.

There are people whom I would be surprised to run into again. People whom I sort of know, but not too well, yet rather like. It's always odd to run into them on campus. You smile and say hello. A conversation is struck up, often lasting for a good deal of time. You find them interesting, engaging, occasionally fascinating, but at the end of the conversation, which has dragged on far too long, causing you to miss a number of buses, you say something banal like 'I have to go.' and hurry off on your way, never even exchanging numbers or email or instant messaging identities. And minutes after the conversation has ended, you no longer even think about these people. I suppose such acquaintances are similar in their roles in my life as certain professors. They provide tremendously interesting moments in my everyday routine, but I would not consider them my friends.

This is in contrast to some people I would consider my friends. There are those friends with whom you do carry on great conversations, intellectual or otherwise. Then there are those whom you are comfortable enough with to not feel the need to fill every moment with speech. A companionable silence is severely underrated amongst the young. It is considered to be a sign that there is nothing left to talk about. I feel that this is a severe misconception. When I claim to enjoy the company of another person, I mean by this that the presence of this person puts me in a better mood. I enjoy being around this person. Whether this person has anything interesting to say at the moment is irrelevant. If I enjoy nothing more than the conversations I have with this person, then it is inaccurate to say that I enjoy her company. Rather, I find the conversation enjoyable.

Is this a difficult concept to grasp? I find surfing Wikipedia or reading an encyclopedia to be interesting. I am acquiring knowledge on a broad and shallow level, expanding the horizons, if not the depth, of my mind. I do not like the encyclopedia. I enjoy the contents of the books. If similar or superior content were to be found in another book, I would be quite glad to abandon the current version for an upgrade. That is the entire concept of Wikipedia, after all.

When I say that I like a person, it is not the content that I am fond of. Content can, after all, be exhausted. At some point, you will have learnt all that you care to learn from any given individual. Beyond that, there has to be something more to bind you in the relationship. Note that when I say relationship, I speak not merely of romantic relationships, but also platonic friendship relationships. Relations of blood are binding by social constraints, so I ignore them here.

So what is it that binds people, or more specifically me, in a relationship? As noted above, the content of conversations could not be it. A prime personal example would be one where the content of conversations is practically nil. With this person, we simply keep asking each other the same one word question, often appended with the name of the addressee, and the rest of the conversation is merely a series of riffs off the whatever comes to mind. I would not claim these to be deep or particularly interesting conversations, but I do enjoy them, for no reason other than that I enjoy the company of this person.

I do not have an answer for this question. Why do I like some people? I do not wish to be them. In fact, in many cases, they are quite the opposite of what I would like to be. Maybe some time in the future I will be able to figure this out, but not now. So I can only shrug and offer a banal 'Je ne sais pas.'