While, in general, I loath to point out the utter misery and dejection that passes for existence in these times, I thought I’d make an exception this week. Life sucks.

Actually, that may not be entirely appropriate; “suck” has all sorts of sexual innuendos attached, and I wouldn’t want to hint falsely at some kind of carnal activity.

I suppose, also, that life isn’t really that bad — as awful as things may be here, most people at least have a base camp somewhere. A place that is filled with fond memories and friends, friends whose interests differ from yours to a somewhat greater extent than simply studying a different equation.

Of course, if one is an international student, such a place, if it exists, is far away. And far away means it is rarely frequented.

Absence does not make the heart grow fonder; actually absence makes people forget. If you don’t see your college roommate for 18 months, he or she becomes a little detached (an effect usually enhanced by the fact that said roommate probably has a real job and a real life).

Worse, your group of acquaintances and your social sphere of influence still exist. Just without you. The bonds they all formed during those wild days of youth are reinforced by those occasional get-togethers which you can never make (6,000 miles is rather a trek), while your ties to the group fray and break apart.

The loss of friends is not simply a consequence of distance, nor of the fact that we lead very different lives from our former peers. There is another phenomenon playing a significant role: We’re boring.

Actually calling us dull is probably an insult to blunt razor blades everywhere — being dull is often accompanied by some sort of self awareness, a quality we mostly certainly lack.

I’ve just returned from a brief trip back to the motherland, where I had the opportunity to catch up with some old friends. To be fair, the catching up went quite well at first — there were many folks I hadn’t seen for a long time and who have had exciting things happen in their lives.

The problems, though, started when I was called to describe the happenings of my continued survival. For sadly, when one’s daily routine involves waking up, thinking about physics, complaining about life and going to sleep, there’s often little that is worth sharing.

So, one skates around the topic for a while, until forced to fall back on the only realistic option: talking about work. In my case, this was an educational experience. Not because I taught anyone anything, but rather because I learned a valuable lesson: The Cosmological Consequences of G2 Compactifications of M-Theory are not engaging.

The glassy-eyed appearance of one’s former friends as one begins to lecture them on one’s work is not a sign of fascination. Neither is telling you to “shut up and talk about something interesting.”

In fairness to graduate students and their friends, I should point out that the problem isn’t really that chatting about your studies is intrinsically boring. In bite-size pieces, academic research can be fascinating.

However, you gotta mix it up a little. The obsession, the exclusion of anything else — it simply doesn’t make for good chat.

In fact, the single-mindedness brings us nicely back to the root of the whole friendship (or lack thereof) problem. We fail to make a new spectrum of friends here because we retreat into our little bubbles of work. And we fail to hang on to our older acquaintances, because we have little to say of things outside of these work-only enclosures.

A final note, and perhaps vague compensation for our sorry lives, is that it would only be fair to point out that this slow dimming of friendship is probably inevitable for everyone.

Eventually, people fall victim to convention (which is to say: “in love”) and do the whole family thing. Or, I suppose, they retreat so far into the fascinating world of equations that reality — and its attendant “other people” — becomes just another abstraction.

Want to be my friend? E-mail your vital statistics to navins@stanford.edu.