Ramblings

Today was fairly blasé. Work was uninteresting excepting for my conversations with my co-workers. I approached Mary and she said that she'd finished the new Harry Potter book yesterday. She patently refused to give away any details. John and I discussed food a bit after I brought him some of the snack mix I bought from Ambala in Chicago. And there's always Charles. We talked a bit about books and ended up going on about Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion cycle for a while. Returning to my desk, I had this overwhelming urge to listen to Blue Oyster Cult and Hawkwind.

I found out today that a friend's mother died last week. I feel terrible, not only because a friend has lost his mother, but because I've been so out of touch with him. I really must get my ass in gear and do a better job of staying in touch with friends. Speaking of them, a couple people whose blogs I read have written about this topic recently. One wrote:

The only family I knew, the step family that I had. They're all out of my life. The friends I knew as children, they're all gone too. They've moved on.

I've got friends in the here and now. But very of them, excluding GD and Sierra, and my other friends here, chose to stick beside me. Out of all the people I count as 'people I can count on' emotionally, I have known only Rabbit for more than 10 years.

I live in a throwaway world. I never meant to live here.

I hope that the friends I have now, I keep.

The other wrote:

i rarely see them [college friends] and when i do see them i feel that i don't connect with them on any level. sure, we have fun together... as long as it's just mindless banter, eating, drinking, etc... but that's about as deep as it gets these days. we have no common ground politically, spiritually, culturally. i'm on a totally different planet from them... or at least i feel like i am. it's time to start stepping away; this seems to happen to me every ten years or so. who do i keep in contact with from high school?? one person. john (i could go into a whole separate entry of reasons why). who do i keep in touch with from college... in all honesty, one person. sandy -- and actually she tends to cause me a lot of anxiety each and every time i see her. in fact, she is really the one that i'm feeling most disillusioned with right now. i've actually begun to look at our relationship as a test to my spiritual practice -- to see if i can be in her presence without becoming reactive, angry, stressed and judgemental. quite the challenge, let me tell ya...who else is there? bill. my bill. plus a handful of others that i've become friends with in the last ten years. i supposed in another decade i'll be re-evaluating them.

the moral of the story. the only constant in life is change and the best way to deal with change is to let it come without clinging to the past or present. let it come without happiness or sorrow and just accept it all.

I tend to cling to the past quite tightly for a while before letting go. But let go I do – eventually. I don't mean to imply that I'm readying myself to let go of the friends with whom I maintain spotty contact; it's just that I've been thinking of them a lot lately and reading these bits have really kept up the pressure.

On a brighter note, tomorrow I'll be continuing my year-long Polish cooking experiment with Schab Pieczony, which is Roast Loin of Pork. It's not an especial dish, by any means, but it sounded tasty. It differs from how I'd normally cook a loin of pork in the seasoning and a topping of applesauce and more spices. For the occasion, I bought some blackberry-infused applesauce. I think that much-neglected jar of garlic jelly I have in the frig with have to be busted out for this.