I’ve been wanting to write this post since yesterday, but I accidentally napped all afternoon and boobled around on the internet all evening, so that didn’t work out quite as planned. (Yes, “booble around” is a verb phrase. Why do you ask?) Other things got in the way, too. I made a read four different recipes, then print out none of them and wing it Portuguese cabbage soup with pinto beans and chorizo. I ate my soup, which was fairly successful, all things considered. I had to clean the kitchen. There was coffee to be drunk. I had work to do today (although not the work I thought I would be doing, due to a mix-up which is still frustrating me). And besides all that, I’m having boring meta-journaling woes about why I do this, whether it’s stopping me from doing other things, and sundry not-very-relevant questions.

But I press on, because I know when I am seventy my rapidly swiss-cheesing brain will greedily want to remember what I did on this weekend in November 2007, and since apparently I value my happiness forty-two years from now more than I value my happiness tonight (when I could be reading on the couch while enjoying a second slice of tonight’s pizza), I can but type away and tell you, too. :-)

On Friday, Ross and I went out with Aggie and Jason, who are both infinitely kind and smart and funny and generous and fun. It was pretty great, especially since we began the evening with wasabi-battered fish and chips and my first taste of Delirium Tremens. I’ve been wanting to try that beer for years, now, and it was delicious. Also, it came in a glass with sloshed-looking pink elephants on it, and the pleasure of that can hardly be surpassed.

At the end of the evening I felt a little cross with myself, though, and I wanted to tell you about that because I tell you many other things that are weird or embarrassing or intimate. Sometimes you help me think through them, and sometimes it just helps to look at my strange inside self from the outside for a moment.

So here’s what I was wondering about on Friday night. It had nothing to do with Aggie and Jason, who are among the nicest, coolest pairs of people I have ever met. They are warm, they tell stories, they ask lots of questions, and they laugh a lot. In short, they’re pretty unbeatable company, and this was only the second time I’d met them, so my question was prompted less by that evening than by my own noodlings about Chicago and adulthood and twenty-first century life and all that jibba-jazz. (Um, yes, “noodlings” is a plural gerund. And I’m not even going to touch “jibba-jazz.”)

What I wondered was whether you have to learn a different set of rules for how to form friendships, or anyway friendships that are anywhere near as easy and close and intimate as your friendships from adolescence and young adulthood, when you get to be a fully-fledged grown-up with grown-up jobs and grown-up pursuits. Whether there is a different timeline now, a different alchemy for friendships that start when you don’t live surrounded by broken hearts and first-times and you don’t spend hours every night sitting outside on the cool grass spilling your soul to people you’ve only just met.

And I wondered whether everything is different, too, when you have a partner and you meet the world as a pair, stronger for it but also more closely bound, instead of sharing yourself and only yourself with your words, your gaze, your hugs. What I wanted to know was when in all of this I would dare to be properly open with a new friend, and when they would dare to do the same with me. I wanted to know if late-night blog entries on my computer were truly going to send out little blue threads into the world and tie me to loving hearts as tightly as they should.

Which was all a lot of stuff and nonsense, probably, but I still wondered it.

And so it was most likely a good thing that on Saturday morning we went out with a group of volunteers to help restore the Bobolink Meadow in Jackson Park, and I tired myself out so thoroughly that I could do nothing of note for the rest of the day, let alone have a single absurdly self-indulgent thought.

We spent three hours lopping and sawing at the saplings and trees of a particularly pernicious invasive species , hauling the hewn branches out of the park on our shoulders and suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous thorns as we went. It was an utterly beautiful November day and we did not need our coats. There were about twelve other volunteers; we hardly spoke to each other, but we handed over tools and small trees and worked hard and well and companionably. It was a blissful, satisfying, consuming job that could have gone on forever. When the morning was over we had progressed only a short distance into the meadow and felled a small forest of Buckthorn.

Dogs sniffed at our ankles as their owners jogged past. Geese flew overhead in musically honking formation (twice, three times—a gift). We finished hungry and sweaty and pleased with ourselves. Walking home, we lazily discussed humanity as an invasive species, then stopped in at the Medici Cafe and bought two soft, oily croissants to remind ourselves that even if we do tend to destroy everything we touch, we at least know how to bake better than the other 1.5 million kinds of animals in the world. We washed our comfort down with freshly squeezed orange juice, and then we came home and at some point I lay down in a dark room with my aching calves and lost the rest of the day.