Hey hey hey. I have been having an actual life lately, which is a nice change. On Monday a coworker had given me two tickets to a baseball game. My friend Azalea and I saw the new DC team, the Nationals, get their asses BEATEN DOWN by the Marlins. Fun night. The tickets were down pretty close to the field, on the third baseline. I hadn’t seen a live baseball game in years, since going to the Orioles as a kid with my mom and stepdad.

I used to be a yooge baseball fan when I was a kid. I collected cards and everything. My favorite teams were the Red Sox and the Yankees. They were my chosen teams mainly because I had an inexplicable young-girl-crush on Wade Boggs and Don Mattingly, respectively. So you seee, I’ve always been this odd.

Anyway, the game was tons of fun. We got beers and fries and we cheered and booed in all the appropriate places. I will really miss Azalea when I move.

The life story of one of my friendships

We met in college, my junior year and her senior, and came as close to falling in love as two straight girls can get. The more we got to know each other, the eerier it got, as we discovered that we were practically the same person. I mean, she had a Pulp poster up in her bedroom, for God’s sakes. And she showed me the Way of the Light and the Lord, and by that I mean that she introduced me to Belle and Sebastian, so for that I will always love her.

Then for my senior year and her, uh, super-senior year, we lived together in a group house in the old town part of our little college town. We shared a huge apartment with three other girls she was friends with. It was a disaster. We had completely different living styles and we ended up fighting all the time and it was horrible. I have not cried as much in my entire life as I did that year living with her, even if I count the period when my parents got divorced and my mom and I moved six states away and my puppy died. (But obviously that was a bad period too. Heh.)

After one particularly bad fight towards the end of the year, we stopped speaking. Finals were over and she moved out early. I was going to London for a year of art school that fall, so I was looking forward to that, but “breaking up” with my best friend kind of put a damper on life right then. however, the things she’d said to me in that last fight were, I felt, just so over the line that I wasn’t interested in making up with her ever again.

So, I went to London for the year, and I will definitely write about that some other time, like when I have six hours to kill or something.

Then I moved back to my mom’s house in the suburbs, and after a few months I moved into my current apartment downtown. A year went by. The next May rolled around and I remembered it was her birthday that month. Suddenly I started thinking about how close we had been, and how I hadn’t found someone to be such good friends with in the three years since graduation. On a whim, I found her mom’s address online (she’s got a unique last name) and sent her a birthday card, just saying I missed her and I hoped she was doing well and I gave her my email address.

When she wrote back I was so so elated, i cannot even tell you. I think I even squealed a little. We arranged to meet. It was amazing, so much fun still, like no time had passed. I see her a lot now. All the old stuff is there still, and we can just ignore the fights and bad parts completely; since we’re not living together they don’t come into play at all. It’s pretty wild.

We actually do sometimes refer to the year we lived together in an oblique way. We’ll talk about “that year we were both psychotic bitches” or “that year I wanted to punch your lights out” or something. Lighthearted jokey references, you know?

I am almost 100% excited to be moving away from DC, but she is one of the few things I will miss.

Internet people are people too!

ANOTHER unusual and fun thing that happened this week was that I met up with a group of Internet Blog Stranger-People on Tuesday night. We spoke and drank and ate and had a really fun evening. And it was all done IN PERSON, not over the internet, which was surreal. Almost like when you’re a little kid and you see your teacher at the grocery store or the mall or something, and you’re like, “MRS. JOHNSON????!! What are you doing outside of the school??!”

Everyone was charming and intelligent, and I was fascinated to hear everyone’s stories about how they viewed their sites, and the process of writing, and the whole balancing act of blogging as a private, creative writing-type exercise vs. a public, community-creating thing. (Personally I am still working that issue out for myself, as I probably will be forever, so I have no particularly enlightening things to share on that. As of now, at least.)

Also I thought it was cool to be interacting with people whose writing I had sort of come to know, in the sense of being able to compare their way of writing to their way of speaking. One of the things we talked about was whether everything we write is true or not.

Personally, all the stories I tell here are true, but I definitely try to make things funnier when I type them out. However, I do this in real life too, so I’m really not misrepresenting myself at all here. I very much like to entertain people and to be the “class clown” type person in my group of friends, so I think it’s only natural that I would do that in my writing too.

Give me the gas!

This morning I had to get one of my molars drilled and filled in with plaster or whatever it is dentists use for this sort of thing. It was my first cavity ever (aw, baby’s first cavity!) so I had no idea what to expect and I was sort of scared. Of course it turned out to be nothing. I am such a wussy.

(Oh my god, it is SO HOT in my apartment right now. I am all sweaty behind my knees. I hate sweating. Wow, Georgia is going to be really really hot for six months out of the year, isn’t it? Shit.)