Good friends are really hard to find, but they're out there. I've had quite a few really good friends with whom I can speak openly. I was in college before I even left the military (Merced College, CA). After the military, I went to college and before I knew it, I had tons of friends. ("Tons" meaning three or four.) But college is where you find the people you can really relate to, and while they're mostly intuitive folk, and that's really all it takes, I can get much closer to introverted intuitives. Some of my really close friends in college were INFJs. Which I suppose drew me here. But also we were practically a club, ENTP, ENFP, INTJ, INTP (me), INFJs (two of them, both cute girls).
I visited one INTP website (might have been INTP.com or something), and one guy said, "We are mirrors." I had to consider that for a bit before I agreed with it. We (INTPs) tend to mirror the people around us, I think, not so much to fit in, but to have something to talk about with with other people. I go to the gym three times a week in the mornings, and with one guy, I talk about motorcycles. With another guy, we talk about women and girlfriends. The conversations are rather mundane. With another friend we talk about more esoteric things, although he's an ESFP, and not intuitive, he is an artist, and I have some of his paintings hanging on my walls.
With INTJs, we talk about science and physics. Pure physics, mostly. Although, he's left to continue his life elsewhere in the world, and never left a forwarding address. If you know INTJs, they practically live under the radar.
One friend who's an ENTP occasionally calls me to talk, he has four children now, but his wife died of an overdose of that stuff that's killing everybody, I think Phentonal (SP) or somthing like that. I knew her. After she died, my friend had a really hard time in the courts getting back custody of one of his daughters from the grandparents. He had asked them to take care of her for a while, since he was already overwhelmed with three other children. But the grandmother was making it difficult for him to finally get his youngest daughter back. Until my friend got in front of the judge and explained his situation, his former wife had become a drug user, and he didn't want her to be around his house with three kids. If she was arrested or caught with drugs around his house, he could lose all of his children.
But she was coming around, and one thing led to another and then one day she got pregnant with their fourth child. He booted her out, not knowing that she was pregnant until later. She moved back to Florida, where she finally had the child, but also shortly after, died from her overdose. The child was put into state custody, and eventually the father was located - in Texas. He (my firend) asked the grandparents to take care of the little girl until he could get his head back together after the loss of his estranged wife, the mother of his children.
The judge chided the grandmother for standing in the way of my friend getting his fourth child back. He had broken down in tears in the court that day, trying to understand why the state was making it so hard for him. The legal expenses were an extra burden, while he was trying to hold down a professional job and raise three other children at the same time.
My ENFP friend was from Spain, his family was (as far as I know, still) wealthy. Soon after he graduated, he took on a huge building project in Santiago, Chile, that made him very wealthy, even without his father's wealth. He contacted me once from Spain at my hotel in Paris, where I was on a sabbatical, working on one of my theories that had confounded me for a number of years.
My INFJ ladyfriends, both got married to other guys, although they gave me all the opportunities in the world to become their spouse (at least one of them). One lives in Washington State, the other lives in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. One's a psychologist/counselor for high school children, the other became a physical therapist. She has two sons, last I saw.
Today I live outside the big city, in a largish sort of Florida town, where about 0.8% of the population has a Ph.D., so when I go to the local gym, I'm fairly surrounded by folk with a simple view of life and the world. I can call them friends if I like, but I only connect with them when I'm at the gym. Sometimes they come see me at my house. Most of them are old, like me, and we connect at that level. One of my older friends recently passed away, and when I went to the service, all of the people there I knew from the gym - the only place I go. His family were there from New York and I think they were a bit surprised by how many friends he had from the gym, of all places.
The nearest colleges are Daytona State, and UCF. But both are long trips for me, and I know only a few people from each of those places now. Actually, Stetson is close by, but I've only known one person from there, the daughter of a woman I was dating for a while. It's hardly an introduction to the people whose company I enjoy the most at the universities - the faculty. I spent time with every one of my professors, getting to know them and just chat. When I see them, even many years later, they all remember me.
Do you know, I could go to the professional society meetings I used to attend. You can't throw a stone without hitting a Nobel laureate at those conferences. These are some of the most interesting and engaging people in the world. They're brilliant, articulate and creative. I once asked the President of the Electrochemical Society (who later became a good friend, but he passed away some years ago), if there was any good reason to remain a member of this society after I graduated, and he said no.
It was only recently that I realized, that membership in societies like this do not require a reason. You see, reason is left-brain driven, but we are right-brain dominant folk. The right brain only speaks truth, and reason is not a prerequsite for anything. If you try to explain the reason for enjoying something, you'll find yourself making up untruths.
Perhaps I could make my way back to the ECS, find some old friends, make some new ones, meet some Nobel laureates, and find myself back where I belong. I can't go back to the universities, unless as a professor, and at my age, they won't hire me. They want new young guns with many hours in their days to go out and get research money for the university.
Or I could sell everything, including my house, and move to Thailand. Or the Philippines. Or I could just meander from country to country, traveling the world. and making friends along the way. People find me. It's kind of weird. I meet people on the road, we talk for a while, sometimes even through language barriers, I make a new friend that I know, in my life, I'll never see again.
But I'm not lonely. I have a full plate with at least two dozen projects I'm working on, most of which are just things around the house. Except for my most important and biggest project, Space Telescope. Well, that's the short name. It's really a 12 Terabit per second Deep Space Laser Telecommunications Network. But I don't have an acronym for this.
What I'd really like to get back to is my bigger theories. Now that my mathematics have improved, substantially, I'll bet that I could build some better equations to go along with my theories, and other physicists would stop calling my work "philosophy." Which is only slightly irritating.
Say, does that "Newbie" thing go as the number of words or the number of posts? Because I could really spread this one out over several posts.
As far as I can tell, I'm just typing this stuff out to the universe, where it will dissolve into a mist and bury itself in the underlying layers of reality. I don't know if anyone's paying attention or not. Or even cares.
But there it is. I have no friends. For now. Well, I do have folks who will admit to being my friend. I'm not sure if that counts.
