[first of all I’d like to acknowledge that the caption above - ‘oh god oh god how do you friend’ - can be read equally well as ‘Jack has no idea how to friend, end of’ or ‘Jack has no idea how to just friend, when a hot guy is touching him, what,’ but the discussion below is entirely about the former meaning.]
Posting sparked by this discussion at @garden-of-succulents, though I’ve had all these ideas and wanting to write them for over a year.
Ngozi said that Kent was Jack's first best friend at, what. 15? 16? And I started writing a whole story, based just on that.
I don't find it unbelievable. I don't find it sad. I found it, when I heard it - (though this may be a hyperbole) - one of the most hashtag relateable things that I'd heard in quite a while.
I had no friends until I was eleven. And then my first friend was my best friend, of course, because she was my only friend - though she always had a couple other 'best friends' on the same level as me. At thirteen, I managed a second friend, and by fifteen or sixteen, well, it got fuzzy. But I had more than those two. Probably.
But if I can have no friends till eleven (which, I did), why can't Jack have no friends till fifteen or sixteen? It's a few more years, sure, but the first sounds just as hard to believe, I think, to most people, as the second does.
I want to discuss a few things in a little more detail.
From an outside view, it may have looked like I had friends as a kid. There were other kids whose parents arranged with mine for us to have playdates: we did, sometimes. At school, there was no one who'd talk to me voluntarily, no one I had any freaking idea how to talk to anyway. But I picked a few kids in every class anyway as 'friends,' meaning that they'd let me do group work with them when we had do to group work, sometimes, if no one more desirable asked them first; they'd let me join them in foursquare or jump rope games. Sometimes, maybe.
I didn't, at that point, get that a friend was someone who you enjoyed spending time with just because. I didn't get that that was a thing that existed. I thought friends were for doing stuff with, for having people to do stuff with, or, just, idk. A fact of the universe that's inexplicable and axiomatic, like so much else (and also not for me).
It wasn't sad. I wasn't lonely. (Well, okay, I was sad for other reasons, and I wanted people to be 'nice' to me rather than 'mean,' but I never thought of myself as 'lonely cause I didn't have friends!')
So, back to Jack. We have no idea how he and Kent became friends. Or, later, how Jack and Shitty became friends. But I do have a couple of ideas!
One is that both Kent and Shitty are very easy to read as the type of people who, basically, friend the shit out of everyone. Normally that friendship would stay on a pretty low level. No one can be or ever is best friends with everyone. But I could easily see both Kent and Shitty taking the further step of responding to the difficulty of becoming Jack's friend, his silence, his standoffishness, etc., his weirdness and not-knowing-what-to-do-with-these-advances by redoubling and then doubling again their efforts. They are gonna manage to befriend this tough nut, if it's the last thing they do.
Or - another idea I've had - specifically vis-a-vis Jack and Kent - goes back to what I was saying earlier about deliberately picking out 'friends,' because sometimes you need someone to do things with, before you ever have a friend for real. And if that's something Jack did, and if Kent showed the hockey talent at 15/16 that he did at 18, I can easily imagine Jack deciding, okay, that guy's my new drill partner, seatmate on roadies, whatever it is you need a guy to do with you on a hockey team.
And, however the Jack-Kent friendship formed…. I don't think it's fair to assume that Kent was Jack's first best friend because Jack was a shitty friend, because he was an asshole. (Though I agree that Jack is, frequently, an asshole!) Jack may have been bad at being a friend, at first - or not! I don't know! He was, one presumes, very bad at making friends. But that may be a different skill.
"How do I friend" is a real question! I had no idea how to friend, before I apparently fell into it, by grace of another kid's not caring that I didn't know how, for once in my life. I supposedly did a decent job. (I still feel like I'm bad at it, a lot.) It's not a skill that comes naturally to everyone - not to me, and that line implies, not to Jack.
I could write more about feeling you're the best because you're always told you have to be the best. (Or could I? I have a whole backlog of posts on that subject, and also notes towards an original novel.) I could write more about about all my feelings re: Jack as a 2e kid, but… this post is more than long enough! (I do keep getting swamped with those feelings, though.)
I want to say, though, just one more thing that's part of this discussion. I don't have a diagnosis, but I'm probably Autistic: both the (awful) online test and my strong #it me reaction about many many many things that Autistic people who I've read say about it seem to point in that direction. And, likewise, of course it's not canon, but I do read Jack as Autistic, too.
… But maybe he could be [edited to change: allistic, it’s been pointed out to me that his anxiety already means he’s not neurotypical] and still just literally have no idea how to friend, because he didn't have realsocialskills to tell him how as a kid anymore than I did? Or do the two halves of that sentence never go together. I don't know, how’m I supposed to know.
I spent the morning going through yoga poses for my sacral chakra (because my lower back has been out for a month, but I really really didn't want to have to find a chiropractor) I even went through meditating on the color orange...and I finally got my back back in. So I went out to go tell mr61below that his crackpot method using a dumbbell worked, and I saw this in the middle of the driveway, half-buried in the dirt. IN MY DRIVEWAY.
in the AU where he decides hockey isn’t actually, really, if he chooses, what he wants to do with his life. He’d just needed to take time out to think.
There's a precision to it. He's very analytical, very methodical. People who just see his work are surprised when they hear how he talks about it. He discusses ratios of composition and lens/aperture settings and when they ask, “What does this detail mean? What were you trying to do in this piece?” he says, “I was using this speed setting to get a trail from the geese’ wings.”
And the art critics shake their heads, and wander off to talk to someone more interesting.
