On Friends, Friendship, and the Internet

Oh, the random musings. I listened to great music while I folded laundry. If my thoughts were fish, they didn't so much scatter as lay lazily beneath the surface; like those mall-walkway koi that just kind of SIT there, all ornamental like, they moved sluggishly and without purpose. I attempted to reign them in and failed, so there will be no coherent post. What follows is the random post-feeding-frenzy koi-like movement of my thoughts.

I have a new friend. It is a curious thing, making a friend in a time when I am so needy. But I suppose we have that in common, this new friend and I, since she has moved - newly single - across the country with her two children and is feeling adrift and rootless. I'm adrift in my own, less tangible way. Gestating my own midwife-self. I've become quite insane of late, not quite grounded to my sense of self in the same way I see so many pregnant women teetering between two selves. All that garble aside, I have this new friend and I've taken her into my inner circle with a rapidity that I found astounding. She's the first of my close friends (the other two being Marie and ~L~) that I've met online. Which is not to say that we had an online-relationship-catalyzed blind date, but that realization struck me the other day as I drove home from her house. The reality is, of course, much more complex than that. I don't exactly troll the internet looking for friends, and neither does she, so a certain kismet (albeit a strange electronic and entirely verbal one) drew us through several groups and into a newer, tighter arrangement that happens to include all of my real-live-in-the-flesh friends.

I repaid her for a grueling day of babysitting - and bonus homecooked dinner - by obliterating her wooden gatepost with the back of my van (also somewhat obliterated). Shit.

I'm feeling like I'm asking a lot of my friends lately, without being able to return much except my thoughts and affection. They are wonderful, wonderful people.