friends – Page 2 – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

0b6622fce10fd4eb2d2d03ed66c87c74.400x254x1.png I’m not convinced this is actually a terribly important or interesting insight for anybody other than me, but it’s been on my mind for the last couple of days and I wanted to get it written down before it slipped away.

My son is four. He’s in preschool now– real preschool, which means that I can’t just go get him if I’m home and bored in the afternoon any longer, which hit me the other day while I was heading to the car to do just that. There are, I don’t know, eleven or twelve other kids in his class, something like that.

He has four friends. Now, at his age, “friendship” is obviously a really fungible concept, but there are two kids from his previous day care who are still showing up at our house (and vice versa) every once in a while and there are two kids in his preschool class who he seems to be part of a mutual admiration society with more so than the rest of the kids. That’s not to say that he doesn’t play with the others, of course, but these kids clearly are getting more attention than the others. And, interestingly, they give me more attention than the others, too. I’ve been dropping the boy off lately, and generally walk with him to his classroom, and one of the kids has been insisting that he also gets a hug before I can leave. The other one seems to be more of a priority during the after-school program despite being in his class, but she too insists on me paying attention to her a lot of the time before I am allowed to take ~~her~~ (him! Him! Christ, I’m only getting my own kid.) home– either that or he’ll drag me over to her to have her tell me something about their day.

What’s gotten into my head is that he’s at least in theory at the point where he might know some of these kids for a very, very long time. Now, I’m not friends any longer with anyone who I knew as far back as nursery school, but I was through college or so, and my oldest friends now are people I met in middle school or late elementary. But part of the deal at Hogwarts is keeping their clan together– I get the feeling that a lot of the kids that eventually transition out of there are graduating, meaning that they’ve been with mostly the same kids for a bunch of years. So it’s possible that he’ll be forming lifelong friendships earlier than I did, especially if we’re able to afford to keep him at this school. I have– most people do, I imagine– my own relationships with the parents of some of my friends who I’ve known for a really long time. And it’s interesting that we’ve gotten to the point with him where I can look around at the kids he knows and go “Which ones am I going to have to buy high school graduation cards for?”

In, like, 2030 or whatever.

Nah. No way I live that long. Never mind.

Quick, but simple: I have a few questions about Goodreads, and I know a number of you are way more into it than I am, so maybe one or more of you could help out. One of these is sort of a LMGTFY sort of question, but the other isn’t, so I may as well just ask both of them.

I am pretty sure the answer to this is “yes,” and this is the LMGTFY question: if I’ve assigned an unreleased novel an ISBN, let’s say the novel is called Skylights, and I wrote it, I can put it up on Goodreads even though it’s unreleased, right? And this is a good thing, because it lets people set it as to-read and they will let me do giveaways and such. Right? I’m about to literally start rereading my own book so I’d like to be able to mention that there.
The slightly more complicated one: what’s the culture like over there? If you’re an author on Goodreads (particularly if you’re an author) do you find yourself getting lots of friend requests? You can find my Goodreads page through two places on this site, but I monitor my clicks and don’t see them that often– which means that the fact that I tend to add two or three followers/friends on GR every day seems a trifle weird to me. Are these people coming over from the blog? (Have you followed me through the blog?) Or are they more likely to be Goodreadsians who are friend requesting authors in genres they find interesting?

Note that I am not complaining, and that I’m approving all of these friend requests– I’m just curious if my account is more popular than it ought to be given how infrequently I use it, or if being an author on GR is always a ticket to a fairly high number of friend requests.

(I’m here, by the way, and I really do say yes to everybody, so feel free to hit me up.)