Weekend Plans Post: Visiting Friends For The First Time Again
We moved here back in 1990, back when I was going to be a senior in high school. On one level, it kinda was a bummer. I said goodbye to all of my friends that I’d made over the years I’d lived in New York. On another level, it was an opportunity. Hey! Make new friends!
Well, one of the things I learned was that it’s hard to make new friends. Now, keep in mind, it’s possible… but everybody I was friends with had been friends with each other for years. Sometimes many years. They had shared stories and shared victories and shared tragedies and I was The New Guy. But Good folks is good folks and I found some of them and I made some friends that year. One of whom, I still play D&D with on Saturday Nights (or did, until the Global Pandemic). Another is one of the married couples that we go over to their house and just sit and eat and laugh and talk about hair metal and guns and high school.
Well, it’s the latter who invited us to come over and grill some meat and we’d sit outside, socially distanced, and we’d eat and we’d talk about hair metal and guns and high school.
Now, these are good friends. We were there within hours of their firstborn entering the world and we didn’t know what to do so we brought a bucket of chicken. This turns out to have been the best possible thing we could have brought them at this point in time. We sat with our friends, holding their newborn baby, that first Friday after 9/11 and we sat and talked about the future. A few months later, for the kiddo’s first birthday, we bought several Hawaiian shirts, from size 0-3 months, 3-6 months, 6-12 months, 2 years old, 3 years old, 4 years old, and 5 years old. All of these shirts, apart from the size, were identical in pattern. The joke we made as they looked up at us confused was “We wanted him, in 20 years, to look at the pictures from his childhood and ask ‘why am I wearing the same shirt for 5 years in a row?'” When Diary of a Wimpy Kid came out with its first book, we bought it and gave it to him for Christmas. Since then, every year, he’s gotten a Diary for a Wimpy Kid book for Christmas (he got the last one while he was away at college… we tucked an Amazon gift card in there).
So these are friends that we’ve had for a while and these are friends that are tight.
AND THIS FIRST MEETING BACK TOGETHER AGAIN WAS SO STRESSFUL!
Oh my gosh. We sat on the couch and it was weird. I felt like asking “So… what’s your favorite color?” because, seriously, I was so happy to see them and so happy to be back in their house and talking to them and hearing stories about how their kid was doing off at college… but I had no idea how to talk to my dear friends anymore. HOW IN THE WORLD DO PEOPLE TALK TO EACH OTHER?
We went with the old standby of “what have you been up to?” but that only went so far, given that there’s a global pandemic and everybody’s doing their best to stay safer-at-home.
So we ate and talked about hair metal and guns and high school. And it was nice.
But this weekend will be spent recovering. Because, seriously, that was stressful.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Peekaboo”, taken by Maribou.)
My spouse and I visited a friends’ house back in, I think, July. (I guess technically they’re my spouse’s friends, because that’s how I know them, but they’re now my friends, too.) It was pretty awkward. We stayed outside almost the entire time, but after an hour or two, the social distancing wore down and we all sat closer to each other. Overall it was nice to see them.
My spouse has overall been more socially adventurous than I. She has a close friend she used to go out to eat with once a week in normal times, and until recently (now that it’s cold) she took it up again post-Covid, and they’d eat at an outside restaurant. Now, her friend may start visiting us every so often and we’ll order.Report
… well, what are you going to order her to do?
Don’t leave us hanging, man.Report
Maybe I’ll make chicken piccata instead of ordering?Report
I’ll need the recipe, please.Report
It’s actually not mine, it’s America’s Test Kitchen’s, and I’d probably be violating some law or something if I shared it. But it works, I think. (My spouse likes chicken piccata much, much more than I do, so I don’t know if it’s good, but she seems to like what I make.)Report
Without getting into politics, from what I understand, you can only really make claim to stuff that is not-really related to the recipe. That’s why every single blog post with a recipe does stuff like talk about their childhood and jumping into a pile of leaves and finding themselves covered in SNAILS ACK ACK ACK and that’s why we’re making escargots (please don’t pronounce the “t”!) in butter and bay.
If it’s just a list of ingredients and a typical method of mixing them together at a particular heat, it’s not really considered illegal to share it.
That’s why “trade secrets” are such a big deal.Report
I think I heard something about that, and you’re probably right. I don’t like to take chances, though.
If you like, I can email you the recipe. I think your email address pops up on my end in my own account when I type “jayb….” in the “to” line.Report
Fair enough. I will put together a chicken piccata post at some point in the future.
And it will begin with an anecdote from my childhood.Report
Well, the big boss just gave the entire East Area the day off today because we hit some numbers that are pretty hard to hit these days… so that was nice of him. I mean, excepting previously scheduled calls/meetings, like the one I’m on now. But probably means done by lunch.
Saturday is the opening of Bow season… I’ve never actually seen a deer during bow season… but it sure is nice to sit in the woods in the beginning of October. I’ll probably use my half day to clean up my hunting zones – which consists mostly of cutting down invasive honeysuckle shrubs which crowd out the good understory growth and obscures lines of site with bushy scrub that can grow 10+ ft high.
A while back Lady Marchmaine got ‘in-line’ for reservations to go to the National Gallery and those tickets came through for this Sunday. Never wild about going into DC but I’m hoping Covid-DC is right sized for their actual infrastructure capacity.Report
Yes, making friends as an adult is hard. It was comparatively easy during graduate school for me – lots of people at about the same point in life (a few people were married, most were not, I think only one couple had kids) and we all had free time and kind of the same times, so we went to movies together and had cookouts and played bocce ball…..and then I graduated and took this job and most of my colleagues were married with kids, and already ensconced in friend circles, and I’ve felt that REALLY hard during the pandemic, having no one to “bubble up” with.
oh, if it were a situation of desperation, like, I broke an ankle badly enough I couldn’t drive or take care of errands, there’d be people who step up, but the only real “running around” friend I have lives five hours away…
And I know I’m going to be weird and awkward if-and-then this is over. Already what social interactions I have (mainly at church) feel uncomfortable and rushed because we’re masked up and very conscious of keeping 6′ between each other (and the congregation I belong to tended to be fairly “huggy” before this)
Got back started in on some long-stalled research this week; that felt better. I didn’t think I loved doing research (and I don’t actually think I do) but I have a strong enough sense of duty that when I’m not working on it I feel bad – even if teaching in a pandemic is doubly time consuming.
No real plans for this weekend. I might try to do some cooking ahead. Trying not to think about “future” beyond next week or so; I thought about having to do Thanksgiving alone this year (there is no way I can travel to my mom’s, no way to do it and avoid maybe being exposed) and I wound up both falling into an anxiety spiral and staring into the abyss, which I’ve been doing far too much of.Report
This week found ourselves rushing off to Kansas to bury my Uncle. It’s ok…he’d been suffering from dementia and other related health issues and he wasn’t really…him…any more. We knew this was coming. It was our first trip to really anywhere since all this started so there was some stress and worry involved, but everything turned out. We stayed in the town my parents live in and sat outside their house in camping chairs and caught up with them for a few hours. The next day we were off to another town for the service (and we were five minutes late because of unaccounted-for road construction). My cousin spoke at the service and she was fantastic–we laughed, we cried, she aired a little family dirty laundry but she was so GREAT that nobody cared. Afterward we convened at my Aunt’s house and it was just so good to see so many family members that you could forget, just for a minute, that there was a global pandemic.
For the weekend, I’m hoping for a little of nothing and a lot of even less than that. Maybe some cooking, definitely some soccer (come on you Gunners) and reading and beer and video games.Report
Getting my tires changed and my oil rotated at the dealership. Got told that, while I was waiting, I could go across the street and eat at Village Inn and if I told them that I was getting my car worked on, I’d get 10% off my meal.
Well, there’s also a Sonic with a walk-up window.
The Sonic had locked up all of its picnic tables that were sitting in the sun.
I could go inside a restaurant and eat in a booth… but I can’t sit outside in the breeze.
This is nuts.Report
Taking my son to the pumpkin patch. We will see how many* we come back with.
*Pumpkins, not sons.Report
going out to a pumpkin patch and coming back with more children than you came with could be a prompt for either a comedy story or a horror story depending on how you write it.Report
Well, now I finally have the answer to “you know what causes that, right”
Gonna look ’em in the eye and say, I’m told it’s pumpkin patches.Report
Yeah, that’s nice. Coming back with fewer sons is kind of Stephen King, but coming back with more sons is very Stephen King.Report
the question is, are those additional sons animal or vegetable?Report
Either way they’re sure to be carnivorous.Report
A few years ago, a good friend of mine got out of a bad marriage and immediately left LA for an area much closer to where I lived and he had grown up. We hadn’t seen each other, or really talked, in many years and the first time we hung out post-divorce was weird for a few minutes, but we quickly fell back into old patterns and it was like nothing had happened. We still argued, got louder as we got drunker, walked down to book stores, and so on.
Anyway, when I took my dog, all half-blind 15 pounds of him, out first thing in the morning, I thought at first I saw my neighbors cat, fat and sassy Samantha. Well, no. It seems I have a Rodent Of Unusual Size living in the back part of my yard. A nutria, which tends to be the same size as said dog. Not too surprising, as I live about 4-5 blocks from the Willamette River. But, they are an invasive species, so I can’t trap it and move it to someplace else, nor can I shoot it, as I live in city limits. Even those are the two recommended methods of dealing with these things. And, as they can carry rabies, I want to get rid of this thing as soon as possible. So, out comes the pellet gun.
So, I got that going for me. Which is nice.Report
kontextmaschine repost/edit
When people talk about the 40s-50s era of 95% marginal income taxes I don’t know that they appreciate all the easy deductions, all the ways corporations could just carry executive benefits as expenses in their books.
After Truman, Eisenhower came in and the social-democratic New Deal got tempered with the old Rockefeller-paternalism Square Deal to make the Fair Deal.
Sure taxes were high, but. You could buy your executives a car! A company car! An executive company car! Corporate penthouses! Vacation homes! As many elite country club memberships as you could count!
And for retirees too – the “Managerial Revolution” maybe put trained technocrats in controlling place of owners/heirs but it was a quasi-feudal lifetime role, if you made it high enough before bailing you got Company Goodies that were written off as expenses.
Like what public school/Pell Grant/G.I.-bill academic tenure did for the intellectual class!
Like what union seniority was doing for the skilled working class!
Like how they tried doing for the underclass with “New Property” welfare rights before they realized they were over their skis, before stagflation tolled the end of the Golden Age and the coming of neoliberalism.
Open-ended deductions for business entertainment and travel, you could treat your friends to the finest meals in town, steak & oysters & whiskey & martinis, putting money into circulation, leveraging that Keynesian multiplier! You could hire them the best call girls! And do all this for purchasers and branch managers visiting HQ from their small towns! You could fly them! Across the world! When that meant what orbital travel will in 20 years! You could give them pensions! And their kids college educations!
You could pay your executives that way 1:1 at no limit; the one thing you couldn’t do, or could only do at 20:1 with 19 to the feds, was give them the ability to further acquire the means of production.
But then this spending got big enough to attract notice and the government (inspired by the invention of cheap electric calculators that let any Senator figure out how much revenue they weren’t getting) changed the tax laws so that everything counted as income, and in response corporations started paying executives in stocks and stock options (that is, deferring actual acquisition of cash until a nonspecific future date and letting the taxes be the employee’s problem.) Notice how “profit-sharing” plans suddenly became popular in the mid-80s.
This is one of the factors (along with Keiretsu turning out to only work if you were Japanese, and really not even then) separating our current day corporate dystopia from cyberpunk. Sci-fi writers in the 70s and 80s correctly saw that the future would be dominated by private institutions buying everything but failed to see how other forces might kill off the company-man lifestyle. So the traitor characters in eg: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy are all motivated by the desire to get a cushy management position at a conglomerate, which makes no sense outside its Silver Age SF inspirations.
(Shadowrun, being shameless kitsch, takes this the furthest: there doesn’t appear to be a functioning white market at all for anything but the McParody essentials, all the desirable loot is reserved by companies for their bigshots and you need to spoof a VP’s ident to get it.)Report