Spent some hours with my oldest friend last night, in town for a wedding. We've known each other for about thirteen years, a connection that has persisted through college and living on different coasts. She's more amazing every time we meet. I probably am, too. We've grown up, found our voices, and it shows.
In 1996 I moved to Wisconsin, staying for a couple months and then moving back. Now, other than my failure at the time to be living in Massachusetts, I don't have any real proof that I was ever really there. I brought back a couple of tourist brochures, but they're gone, and the only remaining evidence would be, somewhere, a picture of the woman I fell in love with. That's most likely disappeared as well, though, and so the whole experience lives like a dream in my memory. No one was there with me; I like to tell the stories, but I can't really convey the alien nature of living in the spare bedroom of a good-natured, educated Bible literalist, or drinking beer late at night in a garage with couches, or working under the table in a coffee shop for an insane, cocaine-snorting owner. The memories are sharp and present, and mine alone.
Our adventures and experiences become part of the shining jewel of spirit we hold inside ourselves.
I'm watching State and Main. It's even more brilliant than I remember.
It's been a genuinely slow week at work, but I think maybe my boss is slightly irritated at my low morale and slightly higher-than-usual level of screwing around. I should be more focused this week, and if something's genuinely wrong we'll have what is sometimes called a Come To Jesus--your manager takes you aside and invites you to turn from your current course (slacking, doing poor work, catapulting gerbils across the office at lunch, whatever) and earnestly repent. I do need to bring work back in balance: I've been kinda down on it recently. It's not normally that challenging, and I've been feeling like I have just a small handful of small tasks, and in general it doesn't seem to make a difference (within some number of days) whether I really get my work done on time. They always add more stuff, or I hurry to get it done and then it turns out not to have been that important after all, or something else is holding up the release. I guess I've dealt with it okay in the past, but now I'm all moody about it, and my real challenge is to stop, and bring everything back into focus and into its proper place and see it all for what it is, since I intend to keep this job at least another nine months, and probably longer (despite it not being that challenging; yes, I know, but I have my reasons).
Still happy to see my friend last night. I hope she moves here.