aroraborealis

I'm thankful for the friendship I had with contessagrrl. It was uniquely wonderful in what she and I brought out in each other, in how we could join together in fun and play and delight in the world, in our fellow humans, in taking big bites of experience together.

She opened my mind and my world of experience more than any one other person in my adult life, not through any particular effort on her part, but by being who she was, and giving me the opportunity time and again to say yes to something new.

There's so much to miss about her, and I've been missing it for a long time, due to the effects of PTSD on her interior world and what that meant in our friendship, but I always imagined we would find our way back to each other somehow in the future, and I'm so sad to have that taken away from us. But more importantly, I'm so sad that she doesn't get to return to the world with her love of life renewed, as she worked so hard to do.

That's the thing that I think will always be the biggest part of my memories of her: that love of life, of exploration, of humans, of hedonism paired with a deep longing to be better.

I am thankful for her.

It's pretty hard to feel thankful this year. In the last two weeks, contessagrrl died suddenly and unexpectedly, and Trump was elected.

But in dark times, hope shines the light of a way forward, so I'm starting out this week's gratitudes for hope. It springs eternal, the green bud of the crocus pushing through the snow banks, not promising that winter is over, but promising that it will end.

I don't know where we're going from here, but I know I'm bringing hope with me, and that's what has me putting each foot in front of the other for now.

I always have a post-event drop after a large event, and I just finished my largest event ever: 400 people for four days at the Mount Washington Resort in New Hampshire. I started planning it over a year ago, and at the beginning of this year, I handed off most of the remaining planning (which is a lot) to my then-assistant (now successor as I've moved into my new role), but it still felt a lot like my event, especially since most people there identify me as a person who can answer their questions or solve their problems.

Also, although it was 400 very smart people, almost none of them are able to find their way out of a paper bag, which leads to a LOT of frankly baffling questions. Like: "Should I eat lunch before or after I put my suitcase on the bus?" Dude! You pick! Are you hungry now? Do you want to stop dragging your suitcase around? Both options are fine!

Overall, it was awesome. The Mount Washington Resort is fantastically beautiful, and the staff was unmatched by any other venue I've ever worked with, and the agenda worked super well, and our attendees were, in general, well-behaved, even if clueless.

On the other hand, we had a handful of prima donnas who threw dramatics over minor and soluble issues, which was a definite downside. My favorite was the fellow who, outraged, insisted he was going to fly home to California if he was going to have to share a bathroom. (Some of our guests were staying in townhouses with some shared bathrooms.)

But the highlight for me was that it was kind of a victory lap for me. This is the event I've run every year in my role as "Minister of Fun" at athena, and this group is sort of my "home base" group at the company. I was given pretty free rein to institute a number of programs that made their lives at work better and more fun, so they really like me a lot, and they're geeks, so of course I love them.

They surprised me with a thank you ceremony that involved a giant cake reading "So long and thanks for all the fish", and a set of gifts that included a fancy pair of noise-canceling headphones, a set of five gorgeous metal dice, a Star Trek sushi-making kit, an 8-bit mug, a useless box, a plastic crown and scepter, a velvet cape, and ... a drone. Oh! And an air cannon. And a truly absurdly decadent donut covered in frosting. And they said a lot of nice things about me. It was incredibly heartwarming and affirming.

Later, I sang karaoke by myself for the first time ever ("You Don't Mess Around with Jim" by Jim Croce -- with thanks to regyt for the suggestion), because I realized I was there with a group of people I truly didn't mind making a fool of myself in front of, and one of my colleagues told me she hopes her 8 year old daughter grows up to be like me, and another one told me that I make everything I touch better.

So, that was all super nice, and really well-timed, because outside of work, things are pretty sad and hard for me right now, but I have a lot of good friends, and my family is awesome, so I think I'll get through.

I like to think that I'm a pretty good friend. Obviously, I'm not perfect, but friendship is important to me, and in particular, I really like showing up in helpful ways when a friend is going through a rough time. I mean, obviously I ALSO love it when I get to have fun and frolic with my friends also, but that's not where push comes to shove. That said, I do feel like there's always more I could be doing in a lot of ways, so there's plenty of room for improvement and growth, which I'm more or less constantly aware of. But there are plenty of ways that I am able to show up already, and I'm grateful for them, if certainly not for the circumstance that makes showing up necessary!

But one of the things that SUPER confuses me is when I'm doing something that I think of as a baseline level of friendship -- so obviously part of what I do for a friend that it didn't even involve a decision -- and someone says to me, "Wow, you're such a good friend to do that!"

o_O

REALLY? What the heck does friendship mean to YOU, person-who-is-gobsmacked?? Is it all grabbing lunch and chatting? Isn't it normal to take food over to a friend's house when they're sick? Or to pick up something for them at the store to make their crazy day easier? Aren't these the very basis of close friendship?

Yes, I am a good friend, at least sometimes, but that thing is not a good example of why.

I'm reading this article on the NYTimes about the difficulty making friends as an adult, and it reminds me that I've been thinking about the logistics of friendships.

There are lots of different kinds of friends, right? There are the friends you knew years ago and don't see or keep up with, but when you do see each other every few years, it's a delight and leaves you wanting more. There are friends you see all the time, and friends you see occasionally, and friends you are friends with circumstantially rather than through any particular intention.

In the 2011 confessional, contessagrrl wrote a fantastic comment about being a better friend. Relatedly, I've been thinking recently about how you turn an acquaintance into a friend.

I can't count how many times I have said to someone, "Hey, you're awesome, it's been so good to meet, let's totally get together sometime soon!", and had them agree enthusiastically, and then neither of us follow up. This is totally okay, if disappointing, because in any given instance, we mutually drop the ball, which can be driven by all sorts of things: lack of time, lack of motivation, lack of interest-enough-in-the-face-of-other-commitments, or whatever.

But here's what works:

When I know someone socially who I want to know better as a friend, I go out of my way to make firm plans with them. This can be a quick coffee date or a longer experiential date or something in between, but the hard work of making it happen isn't the thing itself, but the matter of changing our habits (which currently don't include each other) to make space to get to know each other better.

How do you do this? Write a quick email: "Hey! I see there's free ice cream at Local Icecream Shop next Wednesday. Care to join me for a cone at 7 that evening? If not, maybe you'd like to get together for a slushy the following Wednesday or Thursday? I hope it works out!" -- note the lack of "sometime" in the suggestions.

Having something concrete makes the whole conversation go more smoothly, because either the person can make it at one of those times, or it inspires them to come back with other specific suggestions, OR it gives them a graceful out by NOT giving other suggestions and just saying, "Oh, sorry, I don't think that will work, but I look forward to seeing you at Mutual Friend's party in September."

It's not that this always works perfectly, but I so often hear people complain that the people they want to get to know never reach out to them ... but they also don't take a proactive approach to initiating these connections. And, while there's no formula for how to make each individual friendship work the way you want it to -- that's up to the people in the friendship -- there IS a formula for getting to know people and giving it a chance to get off the ground. Maybe it will; maybe it won't, but you don't actually know until you try it out.

I'm also a huge fan of putting a note in my calendar to remind me to email someone for the next round of getting-together before they're in my habitual list of people I socialize with and notice if we haven't seen each other in too long. Another good approach can be to have the next plans on the calendar before the current plan wraps up, if the friendship is still in the nascent stage where it would be easy for it to die off without careful tending, OR if both parties are reliably busy enough that you won't get to see each other as much as you'd like without that attention.

What tricks do you like for getting a new connection off the ground?

Like, like, like.

So, I'm back from the wilds of Wyoming! It was a great trip, as usual, this time with the additional awesome of having contessagrrl with us for part of my time there. I utterly adore sharing my home town with people in my current life, and it was extra fun to get to do it in the wintertime, since most people decide to vacation in Wyoming in the summer (and who can blame them, really?)

While I was there, I:

*saw loads of people who've known me since I was a baby
*took a wagon ride on the elk refuge
*took a sleigh ride to feed some cows and horses
*got snow in my shoes climbing up a hill to a bonfire
*saw more stars than we ever see in the city
*convinced my sister-in-law's dog that I'm nice
*failed to sleep nearly as much as I would have liked
*saw the beginnings of my parents' new house!
*felt both part of and apart from the community I grew up part of
*fantasized about never having to go back to work
*thought about all the people I want to bring to visit

I hope to write more about some of those things later in the week.

There was a time in my life when I would get phone calls in the middle of the night from drunken friends. Almost invariably, others at the party would take turns on the phone, narrating the events of the party, hassling each other, suggesting I get up and have a drink in their honor if I wouldn't pry myself out of bed to come to the party, etc.

Somewhere along the way, that has turned into drunken friends taking turns on one person's computer in order to send me drunken IMs, narrating the events of the party, hassling each other ...

I'm tickled.