Having changed schools, gone to camp, and met a lot of people through dance, I have built many circles of friends. These different groups require varying levels and degrees of attention and nurturing. I'll start with my close group of friends from school. Because we have the advantage of seeing each other for six hours a day, five days a week, staying in touch is a cinch. We rely on each other for someone to sit with at lunch and get the homework assignment from when we are absent. We can presume that something will be happening with some variation of our groups on Friday and Saturday nights, and we can more often than not assume ourselves invited. 

I performed with the same dance troupe for thirteen years, graduating at the end of my freshman year of high school. Maintaining the relationships with the people from this group is a greater challenge because seeing them always requires making plans. I talk to several people from the troupe occasionally, but we generally rely on e-mail for communicating. The alumni put together an annual production that provides an automatic time for catch-up. 

Communicating with my friends from camp is very different. Our camp holds many get-togethers throughout the year. But I can't go to a lot of these because of my dance schedule. Many of us do communicate on a daily basis through a service called mass mail, which automatically forwards any correspondence we write to all of the members of our group at once. We communicate about all kinds of things - from a detailed account of someone's day, to political disputes, to general questions for everyone to contribute to. There can be anywhere from one to more than a hundred e-mails on any given day. When we actually want to get together (casually, as opposed to camp-arranged gatherings), the goal is to have everyone there. This requires two things: a date that works for the majority, and a house with nice parents who don't mind thirty-some-odd kids sleeping on any horizontal surface they can find. It's not easy to satisfy these two requirements. 

To me, keeping all the friends that I have been lucky enough to acquire over the years is important, and so I do my best to give every friendship what it needs.

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