The One True b!X – 08 July 2002 – Doing The “Smirk And Shuffle”
Two purposes to this post: to see if I finally remembered how to do the Trackback and to point you to another great post by b!X, which ends with:
I wonder just how many people in America are aware of how much of the rest of the world laughs at us, shakes its head at us, because this is who we have running the country. Have we no sense of shame at all? Are we really more satisfied with an idiot than we were with a philanderer? Are we really more satisfied with someone whose “malfeance” has to do with his performance in office, rather than his performance in the sack?
Are we really, after all, exactly that stupid?

Last week, I went to a picnic at the local home of a young woman artist with whom I worked very closely for several years in the field of interdisciplinary education. My friend is a funky visual artist with an incredible aptitude for technology, and so she took a job doing both at a small college in New Hampshire. Her real home with her really cool boyfriend is not too far from where I am, however, and she does go back and forth a lot. We never seem to find the time to hook up, so I was glad to have this chance over the holiday. While she focuses mostly on painting (now she’s experimenting with painting on digital images) the piece she did that I like best is a little white table on which she glued white plaster casts of her nipples. Heh.
Over the weekend I went to a family picnic at the lakeside home of one of my cousins — about a half-hour from where I am. He’s the only cousin of mine with whom I’ve ever felt enough in common to consider a friend. I don’t see too much of him and his live-in lady during the rest of the year, but I love going out there in the summer. He had also invited some other relatives — all Polish born and still bilingual. I grew up being able to speak Polish, and I get a kick out of realizing that I can still follow conversations in that language even though I can’t remember enough of the vocabulary to speak it. Except for my cousin and his girlfriend, I felt as unconnected to these relatives as if they were just passing acquaintances. And it has nothing to do with the language. It has more to do with the way we view the world and our places in it.
It must be awfully nice to have your family members also be your friends. It must be.

Old friends, memory brushes the same years,
Silently sharing the same fears….
— Old Friends, Simon and Garfunkel
Over the course of a lifetime, you meet a few people who become your friends and stay your friends, even if you lose touch for a while. I don’t know what the variable is that keeps the connection open between some old friends but not between others.
Yesterday I had a visit from a former Significant Other. He lives in Pacific Northwest now, and we exchange emails every once in a while. He had come out to visit his family in various locales in the Northeast, and he had a few hours in between visits, so he stopped by. We had had a few good years together, years ago, — dancing, vacationing, just hanging out, arguing politics (both government and gender). One summer we rented a houseboat and cruised around the St. Lawrence Seaway for a couple of weeks. I remember that he invented coffee bags long before anyone else had every heard of the things. He would empty out tea bags and fill them with ground coffee beans, and then he could just make himself a quick cup of regular whenever he wanted. (I neither drink nor make coffee). I guess our relationship just ran its course.
Before he moved across the country, and long after we had stopped being each other’s Significant, I ran into him at a ballroom dance and he told me that he was going out to Oregon to check out where he might want to live. When I mentioned that my son was living out there, he invited me to come along on the trip and pay a visit to theonetruebix and the cybercafe that he owned back then. My old friend and I had a relaxed, comfortable, and Platonic time visiting and sightseeing and even making it out to the Pacific Ocean for the first time in both our lives. My mother still says he was the nicest guy I dated since my divorce.