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.

Interesting?

It's been a while. Perhaps my longest blog break since I started this crazy thing, although I am not sure about that and am not about to dig back and figure it out.

It isn't like I've got anything particularly interesting to say. I've been busy. I'm adjusting to the slower pace of clinic days and the less intense personalities in the new placement. Some of the things that sounded really daunting are turning out not to be, and vice versa. The sheer time-volume demand is draining.

The kids stayed the night last night with my mother-in-law. All three of them. BittyPrincess did fine, I'm told, and is up for a semi-planned ("we'll see how the first night goes") second night tonight. Fran and I had an in-house date night last night, and a very late morning this morning.

I couldn't think of anything that I *really* wanted to do without my kids, except fill a gap in my wardrobe (having put a hole in yet another pair of pants, need to stop doing that...I'm almost as bad as the kids with the knees, I swear). Clothing shopping with kids bites large.

I kept my promise not to even look at anything for anyone but myself.

In a melancholy mood on the drive home in the drizzle (where the fuck is summer?), I stopped at the falls. In an odd moment of impulse/whimsy/whatever, I hiked down to the base of the falls, clogs and inappropriate clothing and all.

I arrived in one piece at the bottom of the falls, and stood for quite some time at the lookout (you cannot approach the falls closely this time of year). I was, apparently, the only being fool enough to come down on a day like this.

The waterfall was violent today. I watched the water hasten over the ledge, hitting the pool with vigor and sending blossoming plume-ghosts far into the air, exploding into the mist and roiling into the greater river. Violent, angry, beautiful. The roar of the water and the verbal clatter of my internal monologue rushed in my ears. It was probably the longest chunk of time I've spent unguiltily just-for-me in a year or more.

I passed several small groupings of people on my way back up. I am not sure why the universe thought I deserved that time alone, but obviously it did.

My friends deserve a post of their own, and I'll write it my head while I fold laundry and come back with it later.

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