Strangled in the social net

At the beginning of the school year, a classmate and I discussed how we should start a casual study group. We talked about the timing and game plan of a potential study group. Weeks go by and it finally seems like a good time to benefit from group study sessions. I run into my classmate during break and ask her about it.

She looks at me as if she is annoyed that I remembered. She leans over and say, "Yeah, we changed the date and time. Don't tell anyone about it, though. We dont want to add a bunch of people."

Wow, turns out she decided to get selective- so selective that I was cut out of the loop. This annoys me greatly and makes no sense. On many occassions, she's come up and chatted with me and invited me to do other things with her. It's like she's using different people to get different things from them. This is so not cool-- and so not what friendship is about.

During lunch, I find out that a couple of my friends are going to a cocktail-like party friday night at another classmate's house. For the last couple weeks, house parties have pretty much been announced to our entire section, so I was a little surprised I didn't know about it. My friend looks at me and says, "she's being very exclusive about who she's inviting-- but I'm sure you can come. I'll invite you."

Little groups of people are starting to branch off and form social cliques and study groups. I get the general feeling that the people who I at first thought were really friendly, are really just campaigning for an unannounced election-- they are building social coalitions and trying to generate as much social capital as possible. I feel slighlty used and excluded.

This is law school, I thought we would be beyond all this!