Chatted with some old “friends” this evening.
Back around the time I took prelims and moved into the Johnson Street house with Mike, Rachel, and Matt I became acquainted with a half dozen or more folks online who gelled into a group of friends over the months and then years. A few came and went. One or two had a falling out. Some have become busy with work and family and such and rarely heard from.
Several “meets” have been undertaken, one in California, a couple in Oregon, and one we had September, 2003, in the Ozarks, among others. I’ve slept on couches with or around these people, driven across states, had them stay at my place, and had them over to eat pizza with my parents. It’s a weird way to develop friends and relationships.
One pair — a couple, R&A — will be here in Madison in June, since R got his astrophysics PhD here years and years ago.
My only reason for mentioning this was that I got online, on IRC, this evening and saw one such old acquaintance (we’ve never met in person and never became personal friends, per se) in the channel, something I hadn’t seen in a year or longer. He, S, and his wife are expecting a daughter in June (they do 3D ultrasounds these days … freaky); they’re at 34 weeks now and June 5 is the due date. Another, C, was in channel as well, so three of us got to talking, which is about the busiest the channel has been this late on a weeknight in ages. Ages. The third, she and her partner/wife have an adorable daughter (sperm donor, I think, and one of the two went through the pregnancy) and are looking to adopt next year.
They’re going the open adoption route, they say, probably adopting an American child, probably from a teen mother giving up her child. I jokingly made a reference to Dan Savage — got his start here in Madison at 4-Star Video Heaven — who adopted years ago and is a proponent of open adoptions, and the coincidence is that they decided to go this route after reading his book.
Go Dan Savage!
(And if you don’t read Savage Love every week in The Onion [online] you should.)
I mentioned some updates I need to make to my website — it had some technical difficulties after migrating between servers last week, since I’m the only one on the server who uses PostgreSQL and Sever Side Includes — to which C responded “you just made my head spin” and S said I should migrate to PHP or Java (both are IT folks; I already use some PHP). With regard to the techno-babble S replied, “you need a girlfriend and forget all that jibba jabba” — he might be right. Not going to be happening, though.
In any case, it was great to speak with the two of them — it brought back a bit of the feeling of when the whole group of us had our own “social networking” site of sorts half a decade ago (hey, half of us or more were IT professionals … we were all about living on the bleeding edge. Then).
Thursday morning I fly out to Ontario; alas, Nate likely won’t be there until Friday. At least the reservation is in my name, too, so I can check in. I’ll be at the Sheraton Suites Fairplex Pomona … what an obnoxiously long name. And people say German is bad. There is a “fitness studio” or “center” or whatever they call it. And a sauna, whirlpool … I could just relax the whole afternoon I guess. How decadent.
It’s Martini Time … or rather, that’s the Reverend Horton Heat album playing. The album Holy Roller ends with a smarmy cover of “Folsom Prison Blues” (you can just imagine the Reverend smirking as he sings it) and a cover of “The Entertainer” punctuated by farts and belches. Still a good album, but it’s been turned up a notch or two on It’s Martini Time.
This evening was rehearsal time, and I got several walk-throughs with Beth Anne in our scenes, which was a good thing, since we’d only gone through our scenes, with very little direction from Manfred, a few times last week at the Play Circle. I still had no real idea what he wanted from me in terms of body language, tone of voice, etc., but I go that tonight.
Amen.
So to speak.
