Category Archive

Retrospectively, my move to DC a year and half ago was pretty haphazard.  My newly-married sister volunteered to adopt the entire set of my really fantastic IKEA apartment furniture, and I didn’t really have enough stuff after that to get movers or arrange for anything really professional. 

This is the story of how I got really friendly with the UPS clerk. I mailed all of what I deemed “essential” in eighteen big boxes.  Yeah. That involved many, many trips down the hill in mom’s wagon, loading and unloading, shipping and signing.  Less a few casualties of the “fragile” variety, it all made it here, unpacked and added to over time.

I got spoiled living in Seattle.  My apartment was small, and I didn’t keep more than what I needed on a day-to-day basis.  Anything obscure that I needed?  Ski clothes, say, pictures of me as a child, or nice wine I’d stored in dad’s cellar? I’d just pop across the bridge and get it.  In my head, everything that I own—alongside most things I know my parents have somewhere—is chronicled in my head as “accessible.”

I got an email from a friend today, asking me to join her and some of her work colleagues on a hike tomorrow.  I like hiking; it’s something we did as a family a lot growing up.  I used to hate it.  Long weekends up at the mountain house were the bane of my existence as a child; while everyone else was sleeping in or sleeping over, shopping or hanging out, I was up at the crack of dawn, eating oatmeal (“sticks to your ribs,” mom would say), and getting dirty scaling a mountain.  I’m not and never have been a real nature girl, but I have warmed up to it over time. 

We’ll be hiking here, at Old Rag: http://www.hikingupward.com/snp/oldrag/  It’s supposed to be beautiful.

I came home from work and went to my closet.  “Hiking clothes,” I said, as if they’d just appear.  The hiking clothes did not cooperate.  I suspect that this is because they are on the west coast, in that pile of “I don’t need this enough to ship it”; labeled with the post-it saying “will call and ask for it if I need it.”  A bit late on that now, I’m afraid.

I do have my hiking shoes (I think I moved all of my shoes, howsoever impractical they were adjudged). They are grey and pink, and very adorable.  I have a lot of workout-y clothes, but nothing really attractive, and nothing that really coordinates with the shoes.

I also don’t have a backpack.  That’s a little bit troubling.  I know I must have three at home, at least, but all I come up with here is a dinky knapsack-thing that I got at a conference awhile back.  Unfortunately, it’s bright teal.  And says DIGITAL FREEDOM straight across it.

So, here’s me: pink shoes; black shorts; red tank top; teal bag.  Awesome!

I briefly considered going out and buying a whole hiking ensemble.  This friend I’m going with is a very manicured, always-put-together type of girl.  She’s a sweet girl, but honestly, it can get intimidating.  (And annoying when we meet up after work and, unbeknownst to me, she goes home and changes first.  This has happened twice.  So she’s all fresh and perky, and I’m there in my tired work clothes looking fatigued.  Boo).

I decided against a Friday night shopping excursion, though; if I haven’t needed them all this time, there’s no need to invest now.  If I think I really want to be outside all the time, I’ll pack some things back when I’m home in August.  And really, I’m kind of over the whole trying-to-be-perfect-to-please-others thing.

I have no idea who else is going—friends of hers from work, I think.  Ah.  IRS lawyers.  I’m still hating on the IRS, so if one, or maybe five of them don’t return?  Heh.

I invested a chunk of the forthcoming stimulus on a nice new addition to my kitchen, which arrived today.

Unfortunately, it arrived like this:

But, being something of a furniture-making genius, I transformed it into this:

Needs two adults, pish pish. 

Time for a celebratory glass of wine, I think.

The Girl Scout’s Guide to Life Past Your Early Twenties: earn your way to fortune, fulfillment and true love, plus earn sensational patches for your achievements.

If only it were so easy! I’d love a simple recipe, a step-by-step guide to today’s wilderness of existence.  I’d be a sucker of a sale; they’d have my photo on powerpoint slides called TARGET AUDIENCE at marketing conferences the nation over.

In a handbook world, today I would have earned patches for Making New Friends and Surviving a Male-Inhabited Wasteland.

I’m over at J’s at the moment, but J is not in.  He left me a voicemail letting me know he’s out with a friend from work for drinks, but he’ll be back soon.  Disappointing, sure, as I’m just back from watching Sex & the City, which is putting me in a very lovey dovey, “oh just hug me and never leave me and we’ll make everything work” mood.  Also, in the mood for cookies.  And cereal, for some reason.  Both in stock in my kitchen BUT ALAS, not here.

Dear boyfriend,

Please buy groceries.  Plain pasta and tequila do not a tasty snack make.  I’m going to eat whatever I can find, in your bed, while broadcasting live to the internet.  Then I’ll do the dishes and you’ll never know!

Thanks, and love you!

Girlfriend.

I’ve made a really sub-par pasta with egg, a sad version of carbonara without any of the good stuff like bacon. Still, though, there’s something comforting about sitting here using someone else’s dishes, wearing someone else’s boxers as pajamas, siphoning off of someone else’s internet; I’m feeling quite at home despite it all.

I think I’m starting to find my place.  In life and in love and in everything, really …  some days it just comes together and it’s like, aha, this is it.  This is what I’ve been missing.  Other days, of course, everything seems grey, or falling apart at lightening speed; today’s focus is on the good, however, and really, there is so much good.

I had the rare opportunity this weekend to meet not one, not two, but three fabulous bloggers here in DC.  J and I met notsojenny and her M for drinks in the afternoon, and I really, truly could have stayed for and talked to her for hours.  Hours and hours and hours; she was every bit the amazing girl her blog anticipates. I had to jet, however, as later on I was meeting Heidi and Lexi for a superfun SATC girls night, complete with pink drinks.  The movie? Amazing.  So good, so perfect in all the right places, so exactly what I needed, a two-plus hour dose of that fabulous foursome. And new friends.

Add to this bloggy-dates with lawyerish last week and Devon before that, and I think I’ve irrevocably lost a piece of my anonymous blogger identity. No, I tell them, I’m not really named magda.  (true). Yes, everything else I write is real. (true, encore). And I intend it to stay that way. Face or no face, I’m still me, and this is still my space, and what I have to say is still going to show up here from time to time.

I’m still a bit amazed, honestly, that people read what I say here and want to meet me in real life.  Really? Truly? But I’m just, like, a voice on the internet!  I could be anyone! I could be really weird!  I think you’ve all earned your trusting patch, dear internets.

I didn’t start writing here to make real-life friends.  Writing that—“real life” friends—reminds me of a hilarious spam message I got the other day.  Yes, sometimes I read my spam folder.  It amuses me, whatever.  The spam in question was from Roberto.  He wanted me to move to Paris and be his wife; he promised love and affection and many children (oh my).  It came with but one condition:  “in your actual life only.”  Dang.  Because my alternate existences really wanted to be impregnated by a foreign man I met through the gmail spam connection.

No, I think I started writing here just as a new way to play with words: a new space to write and be unknown and just say what I want to say without inhibitions, but with more coherence and grace than my diary writings usually find.  I scribble away on the train, or while waiting for hearings and conferences to get underway; my writing there is much less censored, and would probably lead an average person to think I was raving mad insane. I just hope I’m not called as a witness in anyone’s trial.

Lawyer: so, witness, do you keep a diary?

Me: um, yes.

Lawyer: the prosecution will be subpoenaing that now, thanks.

Me: well, shoot.

Lawyer: your honor, the prosecution moves to incarcerate witness, as we believe she is a psycho. 

If life was only about surviving, about checking off accomplishments and meeting goals, I’d say it would be pretty dull.  Surviving misses the point. It’s too minimalist: it doesn’t involve chances, or risks; it instructs to stick to the straight and narrow and avoid the unknown. 

I want to do more than survive what’s left of my twenties.  I want to take them out with an almighty bang, and keep the momentum going well past that. The chances and the risks are the fabric of this story. Chances in friendship, in love, and in life depend on just getting out there and toughing it out.  It’s worth it. 

My co-worker and I have a deal where every Friday that our boss doesn’t show, we go to a long lunch at the thai restaurant down the street.  Today was one of those days.  We order a few glasses of plum wine and pad thais, and dish about work, about life, about each other.  I’ve worked with her for nearly a year now, and for as small a staff as we are, it’s a real travesty that I know her so little.

She was talking about being stressed; deciding whether to renew her lease, going through a breakup, thinking about taking another bar exam. 

Hold up.  Breakup?  I love how she just snuck that in there.  She told me she was okay; break-ups are just always hard.  I said something distanced, yet designed to be comforting; something like “boys are jerks, don’t worry, you’ll have moved on from him before you know it.”

Except.  Her soon-to-be-ex is not of the male variety.

I consider myself a very open and accepting person, but still I’m surprised by how readily I assumed she was just like me.  I also hate how easily she accepted my gaffe in judgment; like she gets that all the time.  That must be so hard.

I probably shouldn’t have taken such a long lunch, retrospectively, as it basically dashed all hopes of hey, it’s an unsupervised Friday, I think I’ll take off early and go sit by the pool.  Hopping into the elevator to find the executive vice president, though? And knowing that she knows I was there till 6 on a Friday? SO worth it. 

And yet here I am, sitting here in my living room while all the cool girls of the world are out and getting all ready for the SATC movie.  If I was back at home with my *real* friends, I like to think I’d be joining that throng.

I was never a fanatic fan of the show; I never watched it in primetime, but I have come to really enjoy it now in its on-demand form.  I’d like to see the movie, but I think more for the sensation—beacause it’s just “what you do.” It’s not something I’m cloying to see so badly that I’d force J to endure it.

I’ve lived here for a year and a half, and have no friends to call up for a girly movie night.  How is this? (or, more accurately, how sad is this?). I have friends, don’t get me wrong. My best gal pal hates the show with a fiery passion.  A handful of my other friends are of the uber-Catholic variety, and thus even admitting that I think about sex would probably earn me no more phone calls.  The rest are cool girls, from college and otherwise, but not really the buddy-buddy type.  Great to call and say, hey, I’ll be in the city, let’s get dinner, but easy for me to write off as “not that serious.” I could probably organize something with them.  It’s undoubtedly an indication of how much I care that I haven’t.  If this was a movie I was dying to see,or something I really wanted to do, I’d find people to go with. 

Still, though, sometimes I don’t really know what drives me to just sit here and wait for life to happen.   I want that close Charlotte-Miranda-Samantha-Carrie bond, but I don’t know what makes me think I’ll get it if I just stare, willing the phone to ring.  Something to work on this summer, certainly: take friendships more seriously.  And work to build them up.

Till then, I can’t say I mind this sort of Friday night; I’ve uncorked a bottle of wine, am cooking a giant vat of mashed potatoes (so. freaking, delicious), and have cranked up the Brad Paisley.  Not at all a bad way to go. 

You know it’s summer in DC when the interns start swarming in, all hungry for a stab at the opportunities, all abuzz at being part of the proverbial action.  They’re easy to spot, running around in their new suits and proudly clipping their picture IDs to themselves—wearing their red-lettered TEMPORARY credentials as a badge of honor, strung on lanyards beneath crisply ironed collars.  See, I’m one of you, I belong here.  I’m doing this, too.  That’s the message, and I’ve been there.  I remember that first badge I had.  It’d be a lie to say that the thrill of buzzing myself through doors and past security has worn off.  I’m easily amused, sure, but I remember feeling like the coolest person ever when it was all brand new.

We had a few interns start in our office today.  When I stop and think on it, my intern summer wasn’t that long ago—two years is all—but oh, do I feel a world away from their bright-eyed enthusiasm.  Remember when it was all new? And all exciting? And working in an office meant you were going somewhere and doing something (as opposed, say, to staring at a computer till you need glasses and learning mental gymnastics to tolerate the imbeciles down the hall?).

I was thinking similar thoughts over the weekend.  J remains serious about his future career in music, and we took a day trip to Charlottesville where he had a dinner meeting set up. You’d think we were an old married couple or something; like I was shackled to his business plans.  I tagged along voluntarily, though; I love love love Charlottesville.  It’s a nice drive, too, and getting out for some country air? Always a grand idea. (Yes, I have very simplistic, 50’s era ideas of spectacular weekend plans.  A drive in the country? Charming! Let me pack us a picnic, put on my good hose, load up the station wagon, and we’ll be off, at 20 mph on an old country road.  My imagination? Often my best friend for a reason).

What I didn’t realize was that it was UVA’s graduation weekend.  What I thought would be a nice few hours of me sitting on the downtown mall, novel in hand, watching the world go by was, once it met reality, more like a chaotic scene of strollers and wheelchairs; well dressed younger brothers tugging the hands of newly minted 20-somethings with big dreams. It was a pretty spectacular scene to sit witness to.  I found a cutesy patio panini bar with a spare table, which served as a perfect window to the transitioning world around me.

More than anything, it got me thinking about the very best friend I had in college. We roomed together for three years; we were practically inseparable.  I majored in English, and minored in Biology; she majored in Biology, but minored in English.  We helped each other and loved each other, and oh my goodness we were BFFs and we would star in each other’s weddings and our children would be best friends.  Forever!  Of course!

Our junior year, she was preparing for the MCATS, I for the LSATS, and we timed each other and did hard-core drills.  She went to med school in St. Louis when I moved back to Seattle for law school, and I think the miles and the stress of those years really damaged something great. 

We trade detached e-mails, and sometimes voicemails, but the last time we actually talked was on my birthday in the fall.  She was engaged, she said, to a guy I’d neither met nor so much as heard of. 

They got married on Saturday.  They were standing up in her parents’ living room, saying forever as I sat eating a sandwich and sipping wine, a backdrop to the start of other peoples’ new lives. 

She called me from the airport yesterday, on her way to the honeymoon.  It was different than she’d always thought, getting married, she said, and sitting there in that terminal, she wondered how we’d gotten sidetracked.  How we’d gotten lost.    

I think that there are things in life that you just have to go out there and get.  You have to hold on to the eager enthusiasm of the moment, because getting there? Reaching that last day, finding that best friend and that perfect guy, getting that prized internship? It’s a blip.  Life happens in between those markers, and you have to keep fighting for it.  You have to call those old friends and keep in touch with why you dress up and leave each morning, because that energy, once it gets a kick-start, is really quite catching.  And it’s what holds it all together, as fleeting as it sometimes seems. 

There’s a line, howsoever blurred or indistinct, dividing luck and chance from reality and skill.  I just don’t know where it is.  I’ve never been a traditionally lucky person; I don’t win door prizes, and I’d hit bankrupt a hundred times on Wheel of Fortune before I came near the “Tropical Vacation!” box. Luck or no luck, though, a certain fascination attaches to trying—could be me! Maybe this time! We could beat the odds!

With that (and a drumroll, please), the winner of Pay it Forward here at Thunderstorms Highly Likely is notsojenny. Hooray! Balloons, streamers, etc.  If you don’t already read her, you should; she’s fantastic.

Here are the official stats from the secret magic randomizer (aka random.org):

There were 7 items in your list. Here they are in random order:

1. notsojenny
2. margot
3. la
4. lawyerish
5. bunny
6. ashley
7. um…yum!

Timestamp: 2008-05-05 03:20:20 UTC 

Send me your contact info, Miss Number One, and I’ll send on your goodies. 

Luck—sometimes you have it, sometimes you don’t. 

A horse named J. Alfred Prufrock raced in the Virginia Gold Cup yesterday.  If I were a betting girl, I would have put my chips down on him.  And, coming out of the second jump, it’s Head West in the lead, followed closely by J. Alfred Prufrock, and King Lear making a valiant charge ahead, the announcer-man says.  Those odd words just rolled off his tongue, taking with them my support and proving that so much, in fact, is in a name.  

Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky. I think of that T.S. Eliot poem every so often, though it usually creeps into my thoughts at work conferences.  Days when I’m dead exhausted, lining up for the free coffee in hotel china; I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. Harrowing, really.

Alas, he didn’t win, that horse.  I don’t even think he placed. I stood up there at the edge of luck v. reality to cheer him on, however; adding my applause to the sea of hands and voices, claiming a space for me and my sundress among the truly outlandish ensembles on display.

Never again will I walk into JCrew and scoff at the orange pants with green dolphins embroidered on.  “Who buys these clown pants?” I’ve asked, rather recently.  Ah. Gold Cup goers.  The great mystery of crazy expensive preppy plaid baby clothes, too, has been solved.  Sure, you may not be wise to bring Junior to the play park in his Vineyard Vines seersucker rompers (with easy-access diaper snaps, natch), and he’ll probably lose his pink checked bow-tie between the car seat and the front part of the shopping cart.  But heavens forefend you dress your offspring in anything else to meet your pals at Members Hill!

It’s no secret that I’m very new to the whole east coast experience.  Based on what I saw yesterday, it’ll take a bit more time for me to acclimatize.

I went with two of my west coast friends, and we spent most of our time parked on a picnic blanket pretending to be photographers for People’s Best and Worst Dressed, Gold Cup Edition. 

It was the guys’ apparent enthusiasm that we just couldn’t figure out.  No hometown man I’ve ever met would be caught dead in most of the ensembles that fit right in on that series of lawns.  We had a game going for a while: man walks by.  Friend to me: “imagine your dad wearing that.”  Bwahahaha! Ha! We’d collapse into hilarious laughter, which most people I’m sure assumed was owing the vast amounts of alcohol we were not, in fact, consuming.  The people-watching never really got old, either.  The whole event was like a costume party for the office-oppressed prep.

J swears it’s normal, which of course led to a covert search of the depths of his closet the moment he took out the recycling.  Good news: no embroidered farm animals assuming residence; no wild floral trousers or patchwork plaid caps.  At least, none that I found.

Still, somewhere in my head, I could see myself there.  Me in a big hat with coordinating shoes and purse, holding the hand of a doll-dressed little girl.  J in his plaidness opens the hatchback of our prep-mobile, and he and a smaller version of himself pull a perfectly coordinated and gourmet-homemade picnic from within.  We set up tables dressed in fine linens, and have a civilized afternoon with our seersucker friends.  Their children and ours romp around together, grass-staining their saddle shoes but receiving only superficial scolding. 

Maybe I’d be that lucky.  Or maybe I’m just insane.  Sometimes it really is a difficult line. 

Sometimes, being a working girl really makes me wonder if I’m not on the verge of becoming a major danger to myself and/or others.  The one that all of the nurses pity as they pass my perfectly white room with perfectly padded everything; I’ll sit there, perfectly still, staring out the perfectly locked and barred window. “Poor magda.  Her job drove her to this.” They’ll cluck their tongues and head on down the hall to visit the more interesting patients.  The man who thinks he’s a chicken, maybe, or the psychotic German.

But then little things happen to bring the color and the light back into the day.  A man gives up his seat on the train.  The best kind of yogurt is on sale.  A delightful package has come in the mail.

From a far away girl on a far away blog in a far away place I’ve never been, I received this afternoon the most amazing box of goodies.  It’s springtime, and we’re all in this together, the gesture said; and truly, it made my day.  Penelope, you’re amazing.

There’s really something to be said for unbridled goodness and unreserved generosity.  Everyone should try it out.  It’s quite contagious, and really, really nice. 

Things like this and days like today make me so grateful for this blogging community.  I started writing here mostly as an experiment; it was something I’d seen done and wanted to be a part of, sure, but I also wanted to see what it would feel like to write out my feelings and thoughts for anyone who cared to listen. 

I have a tendency to stumble into things with an extreme degree of naïveté.  The first time J asked me out, for instance, I didn’t get that it was a date.  At all.  I thought we were just hanging out.  “He thinks I’m cool and he wants to be my friend,” I thought.  Wrong.  Moving across the country is another good example.  “Maybe I’ll just move to DC,” I said one day.  “Yeah. It’ll be no big deal.”  Ha. Ahahaha.

For the most part, though, these things work out for me.  It may be luck or it may be some bigger plan, but I’ve stumbled into a lot of deep goodness.

The blog is no exception.  I don’t often directly address you, my readers, but tonight I think some thanks are in order.  Thanks for hanging around, and for coming back, and for inviting me to share in your lives and struggles, too.  You all are the best Internet friends a girl could ask for.  I mean it. 

Sometimes it’s really hard to condense all of my thoughts into a coherent post: sometimes a cohesive theme is hard to find, and everything I want to say seems impossible to confine in the perfect lines and pre-set margins of this page. 

I’m sitting in a coffee shop in northern Virginia; an excellent Sunday afternoon where it’s just me, my laptop, a novel, mellow music and sunlight making the old wood floors glow.  The trees outside are pink: Spring is definitely on the way.  We’re coming out of the woods. 

J and I went to drinks last night with our newly engaged friends.  They had invited us to dinner, as well, but J—anticipating, kindly, my sensitivity on the issue—invented plans for us.  I don’t want to be jealous of them anymore, and I don’t want to feel hurt that she told J, but not me, that they had gotten engaged.  Still, it’s hard. 

I played nice, and we had a good time.  Her ring was beautiful, they had a cute engagement story, and she spent a lot of time telling me how we’ve got to get together and hang out sometime.  I can’t decide if she’s just being nice or if she really means it.  I’ve had plenty of pseudo-friends who were really more for show: “oh, so good to see you, let’s do drinks sometime, yes, I’ll call you” friends where it’s mutual understanding that all of our promises are figurative.  Of course we won’t get together, and of course she won’t call.  That’s just how it is. Once I start to accept that about this girl, it doesn’t break my heart so much when she rebuffs me. 

The thing of it is, I haven’t made too many real friends out here.  I really wanted to add her to that small grouping.  Que sera sera, though, right?

I was doing well with this laissez-faire attitude until she started discussing her wedding plans.  She wants to get married this fall, in Charlottesville.  Although I certainly never told her, that was my plan first.  A fall wedding in Charlottesville was definitely my plan first.  B!tch won’t be able to get married in the UVA chapel, though, because you have to reserve it a year in advance, and weekends in the fall are on a lottery system depending on the home football schedule.  It’s possible I’ve looked into this.

Two Irish car bombs and four Guinness pints later (it was a St. Patrick’s day special weekend), it didn’t seem so bad.  In fact, it seemed kind of funny.

It was significantly less funny when J and I woke up, I ever so slightly hung over, at 10.52.  And Palm Sunday Mass started at 11.  There was a time in the not-so-distant past when J would have said, hey, screw it, we won’t make it.  I think he’s coming around to seeing how important this whole faith thing is to me, though, and it was on his impetus that I threw on my clothes, tied up my hair, and quickly washed the sleep off of my face.  We normally go to a church farther out, but there is a parish pretty much right across the street from his apartment that quickly became our destination du jour.

By the time we rolled in, about 10 minutes past the hour, it was packed.  Standing room only.  We were literally standing out in the narthex with a whole little crowd of “couldn’t get here early enough” miscreants, craning our necks to hear what was going on. 

About a half hour in I really felt like I was going to pass out.  It was hot, I’d been standing, I hadn’t eaten anything and had had no caffeine.  I’m a serious addict, for those of you keeping score at home.  Things started looking splotchy.  I was trying really hard to focus, but I felt like I couldn’t breathe, and I really thought I was about to lose it.  

I have fainted exactly once in my life; it was in San Francisco last year while waiting for a table in a packed restaurant with my godparents.  I hadn’t eaten, I was still on DC time, and it was hot and crowded.  That’s a sure-fire way to get a table immediately, fyi; pass out in the bar after they say it’ll be at least a 45 minute wait.  About a million hot guys offered to escort me outside for some air, too, though I doubt that would have been the result at mass. 

Rather than finding out for sure, I elbowed my way out, and sat on the curb for a while to get myself together.  I resurfaced just in time for communion, and J and I bolted after that for some very tasty Vietnamese soup down the street.  Things started looking up from there. 

Maybe I’ll get married in the fall, and maybe I won’t. Maybe it’ll be soon, and maybe it won’t.  But regardless, I have so much good in my life that drowning it all for minor frustrations and disappointments hardly seems worth it.  

A friend of mine just got engaged.  Last night, I think, though I wouldn’t exactly know since she announced it by sending out a mass e-mail to everyone in the world including my boyfriend but not me.  This really could have been well-intentioned: of course she knew he’d tell me.  And she and her now-fiance were friends with him first, anyway.  She has my e-mail, though, and it’s not like she’s never used it.  It’s right there next to my cell number in her blackberry, I imagine.  Whatever. 

J just called me at work, apparently under the impression that I knew.  I could say that the feelings of sadness/loss/abandonment I’m trying (frantically) to conceal and smother under file folders and piles of work are because I feel left out of the loop, but that isn’t quite it.

I’m jealous. This jealousy is upsetting, and as much as I know that it’s ridiculous, I still can’t seem to quash it.  If I was single, it would make a lot more sense for me to sit here and say, woe is me, I’ll never be that happy.  I’m not, though; I’m happy and content with J.  I’m comfortable in the assumption that I’m going to marry him someday, when the time is right, when we’ve worked through what we’ve worked through and are more on the track of “ready.” 

 Ready is not yet; for us to get engaged right now would be unwise, for lots of reasons. I should be secure in this, right, and happy for her? One would think.  However, my mental self-portrait at the moment stars an alarming image of a diamond-hungry seething little fanged monster.  It isn’t pretty.

Engagements are happy, yes?  I should be gushing, yes?  This couple is living together.  They’re totally in love and I know she’s wanted to get married for a long time.  So what’s wrong with me?  I’m the kid who spends the whole super-fun party crying in the corner because it isn’t my birthday, and as a consequence misses out on all the cake.   

I only hope I would have been happier if she herself would have called.  I think it was something about hearing from J; hearing something I want so badly fall out of his mouth but about someone else.

I felt like slamming the phone down, hastily leaving work, and heading across the street for the maximum amount of alcohol the friendly bartenders can fit in a martini glass.  I don’t even feel like me. 

“Magda?” J said to my silence.  “Are you there?”

Am I?  

My weekend, condensed in three nouns.

First, on the fascist tax collectors, because they are currently PISSING me OFF. The scenario is this.  Magda: so dad, I’m getting all these W2s.  Send me our accountant’s address and I’ll send them on.  Magda’s dad: Oh-ho, but you’re all independent and responsible now.  He’s my accountant, not yours.  Good luck!  Bummer, I say.

So I filed them online, which is fine and was no real hassle until the part where my refund, a nice number growing up in the corner of the screen, suddenly just WENT NEGATIVE and all of the sudden I owe money.  Okay, WTF.  W. T. F., people.

I now have the pleasure of paying hard-earned money to both the federal government AND the commonwealth of Virginia.  Magda? NOT HAPPY.  Arrrrg.

I responded typically, I imagine, i.e. spending money.  There were girl scouts outside of the grocery store today, and they were so adorable and thin mints are just so tasty in the freezer.  Seriously.  I had smaller bills, but I gave them a 20 just to watch them make change.  They were so cute, oh my goodness, I totally want to be a mom that sells cookies with her daughter’s troop.  So much more fun than filing taxes.

Before I knew about the hellacious fines awaiting me with the feds, I was out last night with a group of college “friends”—I actually only knew two of them, one of whom was celebrating her birthday, but apparently we have a pretty sizeable alumni base out in these parts.  Who knew? 

We went to a fantastic middle eastern restaurant.  The food was great and the setting intimate.  Suddenly, however, as the clock struck 9, the lights went way dim and the music cranked up and these belly dancers just appeared.  Looking around, we realized—all the other tables seem to be filled with middle-eastern men.  And they all seem to be feeding dollar bills into the dancers’ costumes. We had to decline when they shook their stuff near our table, but it was an entirely entertaining experience.  I do not think the birthday girl had anticipated this “artistic” element to the evening, which made it just that much funnier when we cornered one of the dancers into seductively bringing out the birthday cake.  So. Very. Amusing. 

Belly dancing, I wonder—I bet that money is under the table.  I bet those girls don’t have to pay taxes.  I should really look into that.  

With the amount of knowledge we’re all expected to absorb on a daily basis, it’s no wonder that certain things, certain memories, get rather crunched back in the depths of thought storage. Although my archives are awfully dusty, when I find occasion to grab a flashlight and start shifting around, I’m pretty impressed with the degree of organization. 

Some drawers in those archives came under scrutiny this weekend when my high school friend walked back onto the scene, and gave me the chance to rediscover the relics there and polish them up a little bit.

She wasn’t married, hadn’t gained a hundred pounds, didn’t have children. Of course I recognized her, of course she was—and I was—the same.  Older and adult, sure, but we were still us. I don’t know why I got myself worked up,  though the unknown can be a bit distressing.  She was doing her thing much the way I’m doing mine; a parallel life that, by some shift, found reason to cross over once more. 

I think I talked my throat raw catching up.  And not just catching up: remembering and reliving, too.  It was like my mind jumped back to high school, and I suddenly found myself fluent in the sagas du jour: homework assignments that seemed impossible; TV shows that had everyone talking; who was fighting with whom in our class.  The teachers we had and the wrongs their exams surely wrought on our young minds; who got what car when she was sixteen; and the best ways to leverage our uniform to prevail in traffic court.

I represented Sweden in our 9th grade model UN, for instance.  Totally forgot about that.  I got an A in pre-calc mainly by cashing in on the liberal extra credit system.  She had no idea; I had no idea I still knew.  But there I was, high school me in the head of who I am today, chattering away.  Like how we used to make up—as in, really, truly fabricate—ridiculously involved Biology projects that we had to work on all day Saturday at her house, when all we’d really do is watch her taped Friends and Party of Five episodes.  My mom didn’t allow my sisters and I to watch these shows.  Why?  Because they promoted bad family values, apparently.  I don’t think she realized what life was like behind the veil of our convent school (and yes, there were nuns involved).

In a lot of ways, our high school was a breeding ground for sheer ridiculousness.  It was a tiny grouping of unusually privileged girls, most of whom had no responsibility or appreciation for their situations. We had the shenanigans of most high schools taken to an extreme by basically unbridled resources:  drinking in the parking lot, but from a stash of grey goose in the trunk of someone’s beemer; drugs, but lines of coke in the bathroom of the country-club class Christmas party.

This is where she and I got on so well, my friend and I.  We were—and are still—more the quiet type.  Not shy, and not unliked, but not your outgoing popular girl.  We were naïve beyond ourselves, but we weren’t stupid.  We both knew exactly what was going on, and though we weren’t exactly invited to participate, we wouldn’t have.  We were too busy being kids, or doing homework, or something. 

I surprised myself with how much I remembered, but with that remembering came again those feelings—what it was like, who I was, who I wanted to be and the fears that I’d never get there.  It was validating to be able to go to that place as the more confident magda of the future, and I think it was for her, too. But still, it’s with a bit of a smile that I file these memories back away.  I like touring the museum of me, but I think much of what I see is best left beneath the glass.  Preserved, but no longer living; instructive, but not precedential.  I exit back into the cold air, but I know it’s still waiting for me whenever I choose to journey back.  

Yesterday would have been an ideal day for my horoscope to have read “Expect a mysterious visitor from the East.”

A long-lost friend e-mailed overnight, her words couriered to my gmail and awaiting attention when I finally snapped to it in the office.  I’m thinking of coming down to DC, she said; would tomorrow work? 

Though it seems cliché, “long lost” is probably the most accurate description for this girl.  Or maybe “re-found, but it took a long time coming.”  She was one of my closest friends in high school, but her family moved back to their native Japan immediately after graduation.  As in, in less than a week, her house had a new family, and I’d never see her perched at the Starbucks again.  We corresponded through letters and cards freshman year, but the distance took its toll and we went  bit wayward.  In short: I haven’t spoken to her since 1999.

Skip ahead a decade, and out of nowhere comes a Christmas card to me, at my parents’ house.  I’m back in the States; I’d love to see you; it’s been so long!

She’s studying at Princeton these days, and is detouring south for a quick catch-up weekend. I floated for a while on the joy of our rediscovery.  I’m getting nervous now.  Is she going to have fun here, with the grown up me?  I’m afraid that I’m not going to live up to her memory, and the more I dwell on it, the worse it gets.  We were good friends as teenagers. And we haven’t spoken since.  So very much has changed in me, and for me, since then—and I’m scared she won’t like me. I recognize the irony here: I’m new and grown up, but still find myself fainting for my teenage insecurities.  It’s like that sometimes. 

I’m looking around my apartment, the pieces of my life, and I’m trying to be objective: who is this girl who lives here, who breathes in this life? What’s she about, and would you recognize her if you last put down her book at 17?  I don’t think she’s going to know me at all.  And of course this goes both ways: what if I don’t know her?

3.30pm, her train arrives.  When I close my laptop and head out there, these fears? They’ll close, too.  I hope. 

It’s hard to forget the first one. The first kiss; the first apartment; the first A+; the first day. The first friend.

True friends are a rare breed. They’re a sort of soulmates, people who know you and accept you and love you despite your flaws, who challenge you to overcome those flaws, and who serve as guides and companions in the thicket where we all find ourselves.

When I moved to DC a year ago, I initially stuck to group of college and law school acquaintances. These people, while not true friends, were familiar; they liked me and I liked them. We had a common background. With time, we’ve nurtured these seedling relationships into something stronger.

As much fun as we have, though, none of them are really close.  None are “best friend” material, in other words, as hoaky and 3rd-grade as that term looks written out.  I think I have about four “best friends” in my life—a “grew up with me” friend, a high school friend, a college friend, and a law school friend. All of them live impossibly far away, but we make it work. I don’t remember intending to narrow down a favorite in every category, and perhaps the limitation isn’t really fair; I do keep up with most people. These four, though–these four are something else.

I’ve been missing that sister-like female companionship out here. It seems odd, but in a lot of ways, post-academic friendships seem more to parallel dating than family except for, well, you know, the obvious.  Seriously, though—it seems us girls are almost scouting for new friendships, rather than just growing up with them.  We’re looking for new potentials, new opportunities; we’re looking for women to be close to who are maybe more in line with What We Do Now than Who We Were Then.  It’s a heck of a lot harder than it used to be, at least so far in my experience.

I’ll call my first DC friend FF. (First friend—oh so creative am I). She works in my company; I sat next to her at a training course. She was young. She had curly hair. She was friendly. Right there, beneath the fluorescent lights, we had an understanding; we glanced each other across the room, and we just knew. It was like friendship-love at first sight. We called, we e-mailed, we went to each others’ apartments and downed bottle after bottle of wine. I threw her a birthday party; we watched Grey’s Anatomy every week; we’d spend whole Saturdays walking the mall and taking ridiculously posed photos by the monuments. It was bliss. And then … and then it wasn’t, and I’m still not sue why.

We never did have a falling out, nor did we really disagree. It just kind of stopped working. Here again, the dating analogy: it was one of those “seemed nice for awhile, but not going to go the distance” type things. She was never going to be someone who I’d share enough with to really, really know. She was a companion—but not a real friend. We both realized it. It’s hard, even now, to delineate how that happened.

We came from similar backgrounds, and had—at least superficially—similar interests. We both really wanted it to work. In the end, though, what we had in common wasn’t enough. I didn’t stop liking her, but I realized that I’d never really love her. We just didn’t have it—past the initial fireworks, we were two pretty different girls. Just as fast as it flew together, it began unraveling. We both seemed to step back, watching in silence from our respective corners as the yarn became, once again, individuated strands.

Our wine dates fizzled into coffee breaks, then whittled down to e-mails. We’ve exchanged polite regrets to loosely veiled formality invites. I saw her in the elevator this afternoon; she was coming back from coffee, alone; I was returning from a late lunch. Alone. We smiled; we assured each other that we were fine, things were going well, yes, you too, have a great afternoon. Though we spend our days separated by but one floor, she could be in another country.

I’m still mourning this friendship, and I’m still confused by it.  I don’t know what there is to mend there, and I think we’ve each moved on—but still, I miss her. She was the first.

I’m also a little bit alarmed that we seem to be heading towards an elevator relationship, a la Meredith and Derek. Gaaah! I don’t even know what happened. As I tell my single friends, though—hang tight! The right ones are out there. Somewhere.