Old friends and new

I am procrastinating. Clearly. Why else would I be posting a random and poorly written blog at 11 pm the night before spring quarter begins and I teach in the wee hours of the madrugada, o sea, 9 am. Bright and early. This spring break has been somewhat of an emotional roller coaster, much like the rest of my life these days. Vacations should get no reprieve, now should they?

I kicked off my vacation by making a new friend. And in fact I am still up and bouncing from the belly dancing that we did at her birthday party this evening, fully overwhelmed by food, and energized for at least another hour or so of reading. I. has been at her Dad's house all weekend and I miss her. Terribly. I stopped by to see her in a flourish of motherly need and she was so fast asleep that she couldn't even be stirred by the sarta de besos que le di... I was kissing her face and whispering in her ear and she just rolled over and pulled the covers up over her head. Typical.

So I made a date with this new friend, a sweet girl just a year older than me, from Brasil. The day I met her, you know how you know that you need to be someone's friend. We knew. We just took our time getting there. She was new this year and I have been protecting my interests, that is, not over investing in friendships because I, like my feet, have no stopping mechanism and we will both equally grind ourselves into nothingness, giving until there is no more give and the pain is so severe that there is no solution but isolation and (in the case of my feet) stretching excercises and therapeutic shoes.

I bought new shoes. Cute little strappy sandals and another pair of slightly understated leather single band sandals. Both black. Both relatively inexpensive. That was with another girlfriend - K. (P.'s mom) and I had a girl day and drank wine and beer and went shopping after she packed. I haven't shopped for myself since 2003, I think and I decided that I need to pamper myself just a little bit, so I bought myself 5 new springy dresses that accentuate my curves, but in a sufficiently demure way that I can bike my way to work and teach without defying the laws of common decency or university conduct (just slightly nudging the envelope). I need to feel good about myself, and investing an extra ten minutes a day, putting on the myriad rings and necklaces, bracelets and earrings that inhabit the boxes high up in my closet, make me feel a little better about confronting the day. In fact, getting spruced up for no one in particular is actually much more satisfying than trying to please someone specific (anyone really) who would never be interested even if you painted your body in neon mud and paraded yourself in circles around their front lawn. Sigh. But I digress. I was saying that I have literally been surrounded by friends and that Ellen, that's her name, and I, two Fridays ago had a coffee date at 3 in the afternoon and talked until 8pm at which point we decided it was time to go out to dinner, which we did, before continuing on our respective Friday night journeys, parting at 10. I was filled with the joy of wooing a new friend, and no, I don't mean anything sexual by that, just the charming of someone new and being likewise charmed, sharing all the stories or most of the stories or at least some of the stories that will fill each other in on the background of who the other is, you know, common history, like the sixteen year old boyfriend and how you broke his heart (or in my case, how he broke yours) and your family history, the years of ennui and how you ended up where you are, and let's not forget the breadth of current events that are scattered across the table or the couch, as if they had always been shared knowledge. Or as the other K. put it, downloading.

So one friend-wooing down, and old timers from out of town to go. Jeff came on Saturday and I drove down to LA to pick him up where we continued on almost to San Diego, where Stacey came running out of her house to meet us. It has been almost 6 years since I have seen her, since then, she and Robbie got married and he showed up just a little bit later, and so did Ben, who I haven't seen since I was pregnant and we all went to see our old buddy Alex do a comedy improv at some theater in Boston and I had to skip the bowl that was being passed around in honor of the growing cluster of cells in my uterus which have now manifested themselves in extraordinary ways. Ben was duly impressed. We spent the first night drinking bottle after bottle of red wine, after which I made sangría (though they didn't have sufficiently el cheapo wine to really justify the desperdicio) and we drank some of their special reserve krupnick (?) Polish fire vodka, wow, that was good.

It almost felt, in that really wonderful way of coming back to old friends who know you in ways that even you didn't realize that people still can, that time hasn't really passed, not in any significant way and Robbie is still Robbie (though now he surfs), and Stacey and I are still devilishly unconventional in our conventionality, and Jeff and Ben can still argue just like they used to about some inane point and it is totally refreshing. We were reliving moments of glory, almost ten years since we spent only one year together (ok, they spent many more than that, but I was only with them for one glorious year) and they all agree that my arrival our senior year was like a breath of fresh air that they all needed, a quirky uber-liberal off the wall girl from Pennsylvania via Argentina who wasn't afraid to masturbate (and talk about it) and who, Ben whispers, "didn't shave her legs!" So terribly frightfully weird. (And yet I just shaved my legs yesterday in honor of my new wardrobe) Jeff discovered in my year book a comment from a boy who spent many hours of class gape mouthed at my far left of center-field view point, that he thought I was a good person, despite being a little too liberal for his tastes... He subsequently became a raging hippie in college, I like to think I planted a seed, somewhere... Ben claims (and I had to laugh really hard about this) "I didn't even know about sex until I met Ilana." stated with proper emotion, and gushing admiration. It was really good to see those guys. We stayed up late and had breakfast together, and the Ben left us to our devices. We four grown-ups and one little person made a bee-line for the beach, with the requisite layover at the toy-store. Rob never went to the beach without beach toys and I think the last time we four were all at the beach, was the week after our graduation that we spent with Robbie's parents at Salisbury beach, just over the border in Massachusetts from Hampton beach, and the water was so frigid in mid June, just at my birthday, I think, that it was like slamming your head against a block of concrete as you dove under the waves, but we did it anyway and it felt good. Then I remember that sans Jeff, I had visited Robbie and Stacey with Alex a few summers later in Rhode Island, and maybe that was the last time that we lounged around on the sand since. Robbie surfed, after he brought some really crappy beer in a cooler and Jeff and I. actually went in the water (I have pictures to prove it). The monkey child was the only one not cold, and Stacey and I looked at cheap celebrity magazines and to my chagrin I was highly amused by my very repulsion to the whole Hollywood star scene. Barfola.
So she and I snuck off to the store and bought tri-tip and vegetables while the boys and the child were watching Return of the Jedi, and made a marvelous barbecue, with kielbasa and pineapple and marinated mushrooms and bell peppers and I created, from vague memory of the Moosewood cookbook's recipe, a peanut sauce to accompany and use on the rice, and there was far more food than we could eat, but we did anyway, and the cava was excavated, just a little (that's the difference of course, back then Robbie and I both remembered the time he and Maria and I all had our own individual bottle of Asti and we got ripped under the pool table in my parent's basement.) Robbie and I were the bad kids and we laugh about the time he and Ben and I skipped school (Jeff and Stacey were too good to skip) and took off down to Boston and panhandled, well actually, played the guitar and sang in front of the Science Museum and we made $2.75 and two condoms! That was the best part, of course, the two condoms for our musical serenade, and how I took them to Ara's house in Sommerville and initiated Ben in the wisdom of the herb and how it was all down hill from there for him (I seem to remember I two-foot water pipe was in the mix there) and I discover something that I had never fully articulated before and it was that I was a little in love with one of my teachers, and I never knew it until just then, and that maybe he was a little in love with me, but we'll never know, though it might make for good novel fodder, ah, yes, I don't know. The characters for my next novel are beginning to grow, little by little, they are trying on names and professions, histories and heartaches. There will be lots of heartache, how could there not be? How can you write a novel from anywhere except brokenhood, or rather, that or madly passionate ardent love. A novel can be a love letter too, I suppose, though I don't think they work very well as that because mostly the ideal reader gets bored and doesn't finish it, and the most important part of the love letter gets lost in the obligation. At least that is my experience, but frankly who am I to speak such things I have done nothing of the sort. (And it dawns on me that I really want to find a creative writing group somewhere near home because I need real live feedback, and I wonder to myself how I would go about finding such a group... Jeff's answer, of course would be - The internet! and I do have to thank him for his nerdly help on downloading my ipod back onto my computer, in reverse - called "senuti" and saved me the trouble of re-ripping all my cd's to my computer instead of M.s old one)

And the next day it is Monday and Robbie has to go back to his job as hyper-geek sound engineer for computer game company and Stacey to her direction of a childcare center, and Jeff and I take I. to Legoland (she had informed us before we began the trip that we had to go). I don't know who had more fun, Jeff or I. and of course I enjoyed myself too, but they were like kids in a candy shop, or a lego shop, which, in essence they were. I was showing off the geekitude of my kiddo, as she quoted at will scenes from Labyrinth, The Princess Bride, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Goonies (she does a great Bowie impression). I have done my job well.

When we came back to SB, I met one of Jeff's long-standing virtual writing buddies, who was also sweet and wonderful (and I had forgotten how much I love hanging out with gay men - it's just like hanging out with straight ones, without the hassle or the fear of misinterpreted signals) and who I wooed sufficiently (he works in computer stuff at the University library) with a from scratch cream of broccoli and mushroom soup and several bottles of Yellowtail Shiraz (so excellent and well within my price range) that I think we will be able to continue being friends. Which makes me happy because my need for real live people has deepened significantly, as my escapism has been on the wane (I say this as I write into my little machine of death all the random thoughts that pop into my head like how Jenny and I were joking on a non-dissertation consultatio about how we always end up lounging around in bed masturbating while we are trying to get academic reading done. Why the fuck? I wonder, especially since it is usually such dry reading, but she suggests that maybe it is precisely because of the boredom factor that one's hand absent-mindedly slips down and begins to look for more interesting activities. Anyway)

I did get a good amount of work done and I am kicking myself into super high-gear. I have 6 novels to read by weeks end and then I will give myself respite by reading about 15-20 books of poetry, before tackling the tail-end of theater, and then going back to reading over notes and literary histories. I have decided that I will not fail miserably. That despite my personal life being a total mess and my heart being so crushed and broken into a thousand smithereens, that it almost feels like I have no heart any more, and I drive home and the tears roll down my cheeks in the darkness, with broken glass shining on the pavement and a biker, any biker, really, reflecting the light back at me in a red flash, and the droplets of water glistening on the limpid surface of my cobalt blue car, and everything seeming topsy-turvy and me, being pragmatic and cold, and heartless, and I remember that I do have a heart and it has been sufficiently stomped on, mostly by me, but not just me, and I ache enough to know that I am real, and not just a figment of my very own imagination, and that I deserve to be happy, eventually, and I will be, and I will be, and I will go, travelling, lose myself in the not knowing, in the possibility, and K. will meet me and we will stay with her family in France, and with mine in Madrid, and it will be us, two girls, 10 years older and brokenhearts behind us, or tagging alone like uninvited little sisters that need to be shooed away with laughter, and the laughter has been with me, and will still be with me, I'll laugh until I cry, and that, my friends, is the reason, the reason that friends exist, and the reason that sometimes we just need to put things away for a while, and when we take them back out they seem shiny and new precisely because of their absence and their sudden reappearance in our lives.