Tag Archives: friendship

Listen To Your Ashley

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Meet Ashley. You may know her already. Still, say hi.

Hiiiiiiiiii, Ashley.

Ashley is pretty much the best. She writes a blog called Zebra Garden.

ashley1

I had been blogging for two months when I found Ashley. Scrolling through the parenting boards on WordPress, I clicked on a link to a post by a full-term preggo who was singing the praises of her husband. It was her. We would get along.

Ashley has become my Internet bestie, the person I go to when I need moral support not only on all things blogging, but mundane, everyday stuff too. She’s my grown-up pen pal and I love so, so many things about her. One day we’re going to meet in real life and the entire world is going to break out in Handel’s Messiah. Puppies and rainbows will fall from the sky. It will be scary but fun.

Here is a short list of why I love her:

1. She constantly helps me in my writerly endeavors. It is really, really easy to get competitive when you’re trying to make a name for yourself. But Ashley still forwards great opportunities to me – ones that she is also vying for. Her selflessness is admirable. And she looks awesome in a cheerleading uniform. She’s been blogging waaaaaaaay longer than me too and gives me invaluable advice on making sure I turn off the caps lock before I start typing.

2. She takes everything into consideration. Ashley was my right hand woman during Festivus. When Sandy Hook happened right in the middle of Festivus, it made me sick to have ever thought of my silly blogging game. However, Ashley knocked it out of the park with her Festivus wrap-up post. It gave me chills. It still does. Ashley’s tact and awareness shine. She is an incredible member of our blogging community.

3. She makes me giggle snort. She has the bravery to take Peeps down a few pegs. These words just needed to be said. Brave. Simply brave.

4. Her words are mountainous. There are very few things Ashley writes that don’t get me fired up or move me. She gets those words in the right order every single time. Her thoughts on the important things – the really important things – ring true. She will make you care if you don’t already.

5. Her vulnerability gives her strength. Rather than wallow in the not-so-fun things that happens to her, she learns from them. She regularly serves up pwnage of Pinterest and puts it in its place. She lives life proactively and relishes all the fast balls that the world throws her way. She is making a beautiful life for herself and her family.

Tomorrow, Ashley will be taking the stage as part of the Kansas City cast of Listen To Your Mother. I am endlessly proud of her for this and all she does.

Break a leg, Ashley! We love you!

The Time I Met a Blogger

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It’s no secret that I love talking to y’all on my blog. It seems like one out of every eight posts I do is about blogging in some form, and that’s because it has become a big part of my life and something that I get a lot of gratification from. The World of Blog keeps revealing itself to me and I love it more fervently with each little thing I learn about it. I love the people, I love the writing, I love the comments, I love the reading, I love the projects. I even love the spam. O how I love the spam.

I can now add a new thing I love about blogging. Meeting the people face-to-face is wonderful. In the past several months, I have Skyped with L’Eric and Never Contrary, two of my favorite WordPressers. Both times, I put voices and faces with the words on the screen and was filled with warmth. The humans behind the blogs exceeded their online personae, and that’s saying a lot. They are real. Not only are they not scary, they are as delightful and smart and interesting as they appear in their blogging.

But there was still that screen involved. We find a lot of safety in our screens. Even when people leave nasty comments, we have the fail-safe of the delete button. We still remember that those things were said, but pressing delete is neat and tidy. The screen is good, but it’s not always as satisfying as we want it to be. Meeting a person in the reality of life gives us a sensory experience that can’t be matched.

So begins my thoughts on the time I met Kelly. Like, met-met her.

Guys, she’s as great as she seems.

I have been reading her blog since right before her Lucy was born, so when I held Lucy in my arms while Kelly unfurled a blanket for her to sit on, it was one of those Oprah-esque fully circle moments. My people met her people and it was so satisfying and fun. Her Emily climbed a tree at the co-op where we met while she, B, and I held our babies and gushed about the Internet and why we love this place. Scratch that. B didn’t gush; I don’t think he’s capable of doing so, but he had a time that leaned on the great side, so we’ll take that. As we made the longish drive home that afternoon, his approval of my online and now real friend came through loud and clear:

“You know who Kelly reminds me of?”

“No, who?”

“She reminds me of OG.” OG is one of our friends from Korea who is charismatic and exuberant. She fills the room with the bestest of energy whenever she walks in. She’s passionate and smart and she loves hard. The same can be said of Kelly.

A few minutes passed. I took a nap in the backseat of the car with C and when I woke, B had another comment.

“So, what does Kelly blog about?”

The fact that he asked this at all was a Big Deal. B likes all y’all alright because he knows I love you, but his world of the Internet is very different from my own. There’s not a lot of overlap between mom blogging on WordPress and publishing flarf poetry on Tumblr. But he asked. Kelly is apparently that bridge. She intrigued him, and that’s another not-small thing.

“She writes about being a mom and her life but her words are just delicious. She is a Mom on Fire.”

And she is. Kelly is the best of the web.

The reason I say all this is because in her specialness, Kelly is what I know you all are like. We are in good company with each other. Amidst the noise of the Internet, we have all found our ways towards each other, and that leaves me extremely grateful.

Photography credit goes to Emily, Kelly’s big girl. Wee Cee was zonked out in the background.

Waves of Awesome

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This has been a great week, and not just because Florida decided to mind its manners and clear its skies once we got there. (Although I would like to give a big shoutout to the Sunshine State for living up to its name.)

First, Dear Expletive Baby had her baby. Awesome #1.

Then, Squatch from & Squatch Makes Three burst forth from his mama’s loins and into Ande’s ready arms. Score another one for our WordPress birthing club! Now we’re just waiting on Jell’s bebe and the Shotgun Fetus to pop. Not to get all kumbayah or anything, but I feel very bonded with the people whose pregnancies coincided with mine here on the ol’ blog, so when their babies come, it’s a very beautiful thing. I get just as excited as I do when my IRL friends have their babies.

Which they DO!

B’s and my friends Sam and Becca had a baby girl on Thursday night! Woot! Something’s in the air!

But it wasn’t just babies that made my week honky-dory. Nope. Come to find out that one of our besties who we met in Korea is engaged and getting married in September! I’ve had a post about weddings on the backburner for a couple months now, but it looks like now I need to break it out and just write the dang thing.

Also, I am likely going to get to see one of my best friends from high school next week in Memphis! And I haven’t seen her IN AGES; ie, she’s never even met B, much less Wee Cee. She lives in Italy and we were supposed to meet up in France last year, but the day she was supposed to fly out, her flight (and all flights out of Italy) were cancelled when there was an airline strike. BOO. I was sad. She was sad. B was sad too because I was sad. But she’s *hopefully* going to get on a standby flight to Memphis on Sunday, so cross your fingers and toes for us, ‘k?

And my last happiness: Sunday is our sixth anniversary. We’re going to be having a Sip ‘N See (or, as I like to call it, a Sip N’ Cece) in Memphis, showing off our little gal. How’s that for full circle?

We’ve had a long day today driving from Sanibel to Tallahassee. Wee Cee did well, but she got the gassies and was in a lot of pain near the end. Tomorrow we head to Memphis. It’s the longest drive we’ve had with her yet, so hopefully she’ll pull through.

Gas and too many kisses irk her.

I’ll just tell her that she’s the big girl among online blog babies now and hopefully that’ll give her the stalwart boost she needs. Still, cross your fingers for her too, will you?

Gratitude

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I have the best besfrinn in the world. Sometimes it seems like the honorific “best friend” is phased out of people’s vocabulary as they get older, but I will always call her my besfrinn because that is exactly who she is to me, and no amount of years can change that. Cameron and I met as kiddos in sophomore honors English. She felt sorry for me because, long story short, I had to read Last of the Mohicans in a week, whereas the rest of the class had read it the previous summer. I liked her because I was new at the school and she was kind to me. Oh, and she liked Tori Amos. That was a big plus to fifteen-year-old me, too.

Our friendship has grown and matured along the same trajectory as we have as individuals. Where we were once boy-crazed pseudo-poets whose desire to marry our young male English teacher was completely blind to his obvious gayness, we are (or at least SHE is) now well-adjusted adults, married to men who bring out the best in us. We’re aware of our abilities to write well but also that we’re not going to be moving the world with our writing any time soon. But that’s OK.

Besfrinn and me last spring in Berkeley

Having been friends for nearly fifteen years, Cameron and I have seen each other through some strange, difficult times. Bad boyfriends, crappy jobs, rough semesters, deaths, questionable religious practices, general ennui. But miraculously, despite the fact that we haven’t lived in the same city since 2000, we’ve always been there for each other and never let our love lapse. The words we’ve exchanged over the phone and email and on occasional visits have sustained us and continue to do so. When one of us is in a less-than-positive place, the other is always available to offer an ear and one or a hundred kind, patient, edifying words.

Cameron is more than an eternal optimist; she is a truly wise soul who sees the world and loves it and its potential. On her blog Krug the Thinker - which, duh, I highly recommend you check out - she recently wrote a post on gratitude. She’s been thinking a lot about gratefulness this year, and as a result, I have too. I mean, we both have a lot to be grateful for!

Last June, she married the love of her life, and then only a month later we found out about the coming of Miss C. We would of course be grateful for those things in-and-of-themselves, but the icing on the cake was that we were there to share in each others’ joy. Cameron was the first person to find out about my pregnancy and was the only person other than B and me who knew for a few weeks before we made the big announcement. She called me every day over those weeks just to check in, and I am obviously grateful to have a friend who loves me and my little family enough to show such TLC.

Did you think I could write on gratefulness and NOT include a picture of this gal?

Gratefulness means more to me than thankfulness. For one reason or another, “thankfulness” indicates to me being glad something bad didn’t happen, whereas “gratefulness” indicates being happy that your life is exactly the way it is. Things aren’t always fun and pleasant just as they aren’t always hard and tedious, but I’m extremely grateful they are precisely the way they are. Having a baby is the perfect illustration for this. I absolutely adore Miss C more than I could possibly explain. She’s not easy all the time, but loving her and wanting to give her the best of the world completely is. I am so grateful for the complexity of my love for her.

This begs the question, what are you grateful for?

Won’t you be my neighbor?

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Having just moved to a new town in North Carolina and becoming an *official* practitioner of housewifery – complete with baby bump AND a daily-used KitchenAide – I have had to recalibrate many aspects of my life. Not working a typical job is a big one, but I’m not complaining because my husband is beyond awesome and always makes me feel gratified for the things I do around the homestead. Yesterday I made him Pretend Bibimbap, which consisted of rice, sesame oil, an egg, and some zucchini and he indulgently said, “I’m back in Korea!” No, sweetie, you’re not; that’s like eating a pepperoni Hot Pocket and saying you’re back in Napoli. Thanks for the appreciation, though.

But no matter how awesome B is, I need some female pals. I mean, I’m pregnant in a town where we have no family and no one I can really talk face-to-face with about Bebe and pregnancy and everything else going on. The blogosphere and social networking sites are good to a certain degree in making you feel a part of a kind of community, but you sometimes just need a face to talk to.

So. Making friends in Fayetteville. Humph.

My mobility is decidedly limited because we have only one car and public transportation doesn’t service where we live. This means that on Mondays and Wednesdays, when B is at work literally ALL DAY, I am essentially stuck at home. That is, unless I want to walk across the street to the local middle school and creepily troll the schoolyard for lonely twelve year olds or walk to the nearby CVS and buy M&Ms for $4.

Err, just to clarify, I don’t want to.

“Why don’t you just drive him to work and have the car all day, then?”, you may ask. Let me stress the rural-ness of where we live. B commutes 45-55 minutes each way to his place of work, a college smack dab in the center of the next county over. When we were shopping around for our NC homestead, we totally ruled out the option of living close to his school because it is seriously Mayberry without the charm. Seriously. On his way to work each day, B drives past several of the negative-example “Food Inc.” locations. No joke.

We chose to live in Fayetteville, which at least offers some variety outside of Walmart. So, if I drove him, that would be at least three and a half hours of me in a car, two days a week. So, no. Not doing that.

It’s hard for us to get together with B’s coworkers and form relationships with them. Many of his colleagues at the school are in the same boat as we are in that they live in more full-service towns within an hour from the school instead of the school’s town itself. But they live in the opposite direction as us, such as in Wilmington. Wap-waaaaah.

I tried the whole Meetup thing online, but most of the groups I was interested in joining either met in the morning when I don’t have access to the car, met in the evening which is Married Time (and I like to keep it that way), or set up outings that were out of my price point.

What’s a girl to do?

I’ll tell you: grow a backbone, stop making excuses, talk to strangers, and make some friends.

And that’s exactly what I think I may’ve done!

Yesterday I hit up Target for all the after-Halloween markdowns. I was browsing some Halloween-themed nutcrackers (for the schizophrenic holiday lovers in all of us) and I spotted a lady with an infant wrapped cozily in a pretty moby. I think, What the heck, and ask her about it. We ended up talking shop (ie, pregnancy, babies, Fayetteville, the difficulty of making friends as a grown up) for nearly thirty minutes, surrounded by bags upon bags of fake cobwebs. And it was so nice. We ended up exchanging information and promising to get together soon for coffee or lunch.

I should’ve guessed that Target would be prime territory for spotting that very elusive thing: a possible friendship candidate for a woman in her late twenties. But I could not have guessed how exhilarated I would feel throughout the rest of the day simply because I had a face-to-face conversation with a person other than my husband or a salesperson. Imagine that. People actually need each other.

I keep asking myself, Is it lame that I just blogged about how happy I am to have met a stranger at Target who has the potential to become a friend?

I’ve concluded that I don’t really care. If it’s lame to feel happiness in the small things, I am one contented geek.

Perfect Weekend

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Friends. Beaches. Korean food.

I wish many things for Bebe when (s)he arrives. Although my hopes for my baby are all based in what (s)he finds solace in, I can’t help but think that her life will surely be made better by good friends, trips to the beach, and joy of all joys, Korean food.

This weekend was a conglomeration of all three of these wondrous factors for my husband and me. Three of our good friends who we met in Korea came and visited us from all parts of the country. Our K-Fam reunion was made complete with a trip to a wonderful Korean restaurant in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The anju was plentiful and fresh, the bulgogi was tender and flavorful, and the gigantic platter of chop chae noodles helped us properly celebrate Chuseok so many miles from our second home of Yongin, South Korea.

I was a little sad to abstain from a refreshing, reassuringly sub-par bottle of Cass – one of the most popular of Korean beers – but my husband had one and assured me that it was just as lackluster as he remembered it and that it will likely remain so until after the birth when I can resume my consumption of beer whose flavorlessness pales in comparison to the memories it elicits.

The next day we took a trip to beautiful Wilmington and spent a few hours at Wrightsville Beach. I am beginning to show – albeit slightly – and I loved the feeling of just lying in the sand and rubbing my belly. The natural snugness of my bathing suit made Bebe seem cozy and nestled in me as I nestled myself into the sand, layer after layer of life. There was a mom chasing her toddler son around and rolling a ball back and forth with him. We have so many things to look forward to, but every instant with Bebe now is sacred and perfect.