Tuesday and Thursday

Tuesday was one of the best days of my life. It had been planning to go over to Beth's to watch the inauguration, but I didn't really make it all the way to the door and ended up on the couch asleep. Stacy stopped by to see what we were up to and we ended up listening to the event on NPR together, squeeing and giggling a lot.

After all of the hubub died down, we decided to go to the coast together and took Baldr with us. It was a fabulous day, full of good conversation, giggling, and running around on the sand.

From Beauty

Matt and I went to dinner on Broadway and during dinner a spontaneous parade of people carrying flags and cheering walked past.

Then we went to Stacy's birthday party and that was all kinds of fun. All kinds. That includes friends, cuddling, tickling, cats, fire, cheesecake, surprises, and many other kinds that I won't list here.

And I realized that the long winter that Master Chi'ang warned us about is finally coming to an end and that makes me so very, very happy.

This morning I had breakfast with Beth and then biked to Paul's to sing with Beth and Paul. Today isn't over and it's still pretty damn awesome. Why haven't I been biking or singing for the past few years?

one is silver, the other gold, etc. etc.

So it's not November anymore, but who cares? I'm still going to talk about some things I'm grateful for.

New friends:
The really fun thing about new friends is that you get to present yourself in a new way to them. They come to you as a blank slate ready to reflect a new you back at yourself. I've learned a whole lot about myself in these past few months just by introducing myself to new people, especially complete strangers as opposed to friends of friends.

Old friends:
Matt and I did most of our moving on Thanksgiving and the day after, so we didn't get to celebrate that much. But we got to Portland on the other end and people came over to help us move in and people gave us leftover Thanksgivings. So we got to eat Thanksgiving for dinner last night. And I went out and hung out with humans in Portland who were thrilled to see me. And plans were made and such.

Yayfor friends!

when you're not strong, I'll be your friend

No details here, but a little outline:
-Saw friends who went out of their way to see me on Sunday
-Called people on the phone and talked to them about friend things and it was great
-Had various twitter in livejournal exchanges with friends

I did a little leaning and a little supporting in the past few days.

Day 10 Gratitude:
friend networks that are strong enough for mutual leaning in many directions

PS I posted this and then decided to add another few thoughts about friendship:
It's been a good long while since the last time that I felt strong enough about myself to be the support person. It's a role that I would really rather be taking, and suddenly I find that I'm really doing ok enough to hold others up for a bit. It's only fair; they did the same for me. And the best part about it is that there are many people I can turn to next, so we're all supporting each other.

for the record

The other half of my worries about making new friends is all of my worry about leaving friends behind. I'm historically bad at keeping in touch with people that I don't see on a regular basis. So the plan is to be better about making telephone calls and emailing people more often.

making friends

On the way home from work tonight I was thinking about how to make friends. I'm going to be moving to Seattle within the next month and leaving behind everything about Portland that I love. I've lived here for six-ish years and I've made friends with all sorts of people, restaurants, and views. It would be pretty great if I could take them with me, but I know that's not possible. After stressing on this topic for a few minutes it occurred to me that it's really not that hard to make new friends.

In high school and college it was easy to make friends because I was thrown into situations with them. Sitting at a lunch table every day for a year with the same people will force familiarity, if not friendship. I'm still very close to my freshman roommate (we ended up living together in some capacity for four years). I'm engaged to marry a man that I met through an online dating site. But what's important isn't where I met them, but how well we clicked once we met.

So here I am sitting around stressing about meeting people in clubs, choruses, etc, or going out and trying new restaurants. I have to remember that everything and everyone that I'm attached to had to start out as something scary and unknown at one time.