raise your hand if you want ketchup

First snow!

Always exciting--when I was in middle school and high school I had a particular friend who I would go walking with in the first snow. She had her first baby this year, has been married for just over a year and owns a home not that far from mine--we don’t really talk much any more (other than when she emails to tell me about her latest landmark achievement: buying the house, getting hitched, getting knocked up).

I had this huge grey and black sweater that I used to wear instead of a coat. It was my fathers, but it was too big for him too, so I appropriated it and wore it instead of both a jacket and mittens, since the sleeves were more than long enough to cover my hands.

My dad still has it I think. He has another one, a brown and black version, that actually fits him as well--I think they may have been gifts from an aunt of his and she got the size horribly wrong the first time around but liked the pattern and tried again.

I’m still not much for coats--I’ve actually ordered one this year, a fleece from some “mountain goods online” place, to go inside the rain shell I wore last year in place of a coat. I don’t know why I can’t seem to get it together to have an actual wardrobe--some odd combination of laziness and thrift and bucking conformity at all opportunities prevents me I guess.

I used to (and still, to some extent, continue to) have a huge problem with jeans--as in the quintessential teenage uniform, denim pants--I hated the idea that life could be so conscripted as to have that single choice: wear it with t-shirts! Wear it with sweaters, but on pain of death, wear it!

So I never did. Although honestly part of this was most likely the fact that I couldn’t afford the nice jeans, I could afford the jeans from GoodWill or Salvation Army and that was about it. So I wore khakis or skirts or fatigues or (in place of that perennial ‘80’s favorite, the stretch pant) bright red long johns. I got a great pair of tight oil-stained jeans at a local dump store (literally a thrift store at a dump where people could drop household items that might have further use) and those are the only jeans I had through much of high school and college.

As a result, I’m still not very comfortable in jeans--its amazing to me how so many people put them on to show that they are “relaxed” or “casual” for a Friday. I have two pairs: one pair tight (my “hey its almost marathon time: check me out” pants) and one pair baggy (my “fat” pants). And generally when I put them on I feel like I’m putting on a costume, my I am a normal mid 20s girl hanging out casually--see me--see? Yes I am.

walk around walk around

So. Yeah.
Had kind of a busy day yesterday, and obviously didn't get as much accomplished as I wanted to (for instance: no writing). But it was a pretty good day, all told: I managed to get up early (!! shock of shocks!!) for the first time in a couple of weeks and feel fairly motivated in the morning. I had a big presentation deal at work which went sort of haywire at t minus 2 hrs to lift off and caused a lot of running around and panicking, leaving me with massive amounts of adrenaline that stopped me from eating anything yesterday afternoon even though there was lunch at the presentation and my actual active piece of it only lasted through the first ten minutes. So that meant I went to the gym when I got home from work (after going to the city library to pick up shameful genre fiction that I will read in the seclusion of my quiet bedroom and nowhere else) and talked my gym buddy into trying this with me, which I am very excited about (I went the whole deal: I weighed, measured and photographed my "before" self in preparation for the slick new me. Friend thinks I am hilarious and ridiculous, and so far I can't say she is wrong, but I want to gauge and mark and track my progress. Here's hoping for progress!!)
Can you ever tell who you are going to end up friends with, or keeping in touch with? I never can. I think it is very possible that I just do not interact well or keep in touch well or something like that, and so possibly I am the only person who looks back at the last five or ten years and goes "my god: where did my peeps go? And who the hell are you?" I mean, there are people that I have kept in touch with and kept up with who are wonderful and fine and great and then there are people that I've had halfhearted online relationships with who, when we get together it bounces back into fullness and the friendship is totally alive and wonderful and you promise yourself no more dry spells but it never quiet works out. Then there are the folks that once upon a time you were inseparable for months or years at a time and now you just wonder "what happened?"
I bring this up in part because gym buddy is someone I knew in high school. She was Ms. Valedictorian, Ms. I-am-morally-and-intellectually-superior, and occasionally Ms. stick-so-far-up-my-ass-its-in my-brain-stem, back then. So I can't say I considered us close friends--we were both in the accelerated classes together, did the occasional project together, for a little while drama geek-ettes together, but not exactly confidants or pals or anything. But we kept in touch. Through her Ivy league education and my parallel state school stint. My graduate degree and the disintegration of my college romance , her quick marriage and drawn out divorce in (of all places) West Virginia. And now we're living in the same area code again, and we've started going to the gym.
Really, she asked if she might use me for my gym membership: she doesn't want to fork over the cash for one of her own, and one of the perks of my job is access to the gym for free--and I am allowed guests, which I had mentioned to her at some point.
But in a larger way, too, it is odd that of the people I knew in high school somehow I have hung on to gym buddy. I have a roommate right now whom I also went to high school with--but that makes more sense, because we also went to elementary school together, and played soccer together even before that. I have known that girl forever, and she is one of the ones that even though we might go a year or more without speaking, when we do talk it all comes back: the shared past, the quirk factories that are our brains, the camaraderie. I'm really glad that things sort of fell together the way that they did (it started out with a blind "hey does anyone know of a decent apartment for the summer...looking to sublet" that she sent to probably three dozen people and I just happened to be going out of town for a month, so she sublet from me and then one of my roommates moved home and she took his room and has been around ever since. fortuitous). I'm lucky to have both of them around (separately however--they do not and have not ever gotten along, which I remember well from high school) its just such an interesting thing, the way the universe works out sometimes.