Dear best friend,

As a best friend, I am incredibly forgiving.  If you've proven yourself, and I trust you, I'm really hard to offend.  You have proven yourself, and I do trust you so, yeah...you don't offend me.  I overlook most of the annoying things that you do because I love you, quirks and all.  I know you do the same for me.  There is one thing that you do, however, that I find difficult to overlook.  When we go out to dinner to spend quality time together you often ignore me in favor of your phone.

As you and I are both graduate students, I am sensitive to your need to be attached to various forms of digital communication.  We have people to report to, a voracious need to impress our superiors, and a strong sense of conscientiousness.  All of this leads us to feel that we need to be easily accessed and highly responsive to our students, our mentors, and our professors.  You know that I've gotten to the point where I don't really care so much about what people think of me, so my tendency to leach off of my cell phone is much more limited than yours.  You are, however, a bit too responsive. You seem to check your emails, phone calls, text messages, constantly, and then respond immediately.  While I live by the, "there's no such thing as an emergency unless someone's bleeding" way of life, you live by the "everything's an emergency unless it's bleeding in which case it's a major emergency," way of life. This sometimes makes our time together difficult.

As you know, I like my alone time, so when you ask me to go out on a weeknight for dinner it takes a lot for me to say yes. I am stretching out of my comfort zone when I say yes, and when this happens it's usually because I value our friendship enough to want to have some good conversation and spend quality time you.  It's usually because we haven't talked in a while (read 10 hours), so I want to hear about your life and I want to tell you about mine. I want to share that moment with you. I assume that this is a normal expectation of social interaction, though I would never call myself an expert in that area. You know I'm slightly inept when it comes to social interaction. But when you spend the entire meal responding to emails from your annoyed students, then I become the annoyed student.

In my way of thinking, the students are not bleeding, so they can wait.  Whether you respond to them now or 2 hours from now will not make a difference.  In the mean time I've spent 20 dollars to eat a good meal, but also to stare at the top of your head and the back of your phone.  Call me needy and attention-seeking, but when you do that, it makes me feel like you care more about other people than me, and I'm not really into that. Also, while I enjoy a good meal, I do not enjoy spending money, and if I am spending money it's because it's the price I have to pay if I want to spend time with you...social convention.

So best friend, though you will never read this, please know that I love you.  I will spend 20 dollars, that I do not have, on a meal so that I can spend time with you and hear about your life (remember, that's because I love you).  Keep in mind, however, that I do not love that you prioritize your students over me when I am sitting in front of you.  I also do not love staring at the back of your phone and the top of your head.

But, again, I love you.

Keep on thinking,
Josie