Day 13, fun day, facebook and 1986

Yesterday, I went to the Getty Center with three friends for what we had all week affectionately referring to as fun day. We brought books, blankets, lunches and cameras. We talked of many different things including the state of the auto industry, sweet potatoes, designer jeans, photography, road rage, diets, poop stories, cross dressers, and the meaning of life. We even managed to squeeze in time to look at an exhibit. It was a great day. Plans for next Friday’s fun day are in the works, I’ll keep you posted.

I don’t mean to sound like a Hallmark Card, but I am very glad to have such amazing people in my life. We all met loosely during grad school and have stayed friends ever since (I know six years isn’t really that long) in a capacity I like to think of as bearing witness to one another’s lives. It is refreshing and good for the soul to have people who know my story and I don’t have catch them up on the setting, characters and chapters – we are one another’s readers (and in some case even Reeders).

Meanwhile, some of my dear friends from elementary school have taken it upon themselves to post pictures from our childhood on facebook. Now, every time I log on, volumes of my life I have all but forgotten are staring me in the face. Volumes I have tucked away in the rafters of my parents’ garage in a box labeled 1986. Aside from being horrified at both my hair style and fashion sense from these dusty volumes, it is comforting to sort of re-read them with childhood friends. And while the circumstances of our friendships have changed, these “old” friends are just as important to my story as my “new” friends. (Insert needle point pillow sentiment here)

In the same way my résumé’ doesn’t truly represent who I am, I know my facebook page doesn’t either, but perhaps it speaks to how my story has both changed and stayed the same over the years. It is wild to have this list of sorts that is ever changing, compiling people from widely different chapters of my life. I absolutely love it when there is a friend request from someone I haven’t talked to in years. In fact, I sometimes tear up at these requests. Even though, we have missed chapters of one another’s lives, it is exhilarating to go back to those chapters we have in common paying tribute to the special roles we played in each others’ lives. Better yet, we might even reinsert one another into new chapters.