My dual parties this weekend raised an interesting conversation with Josh: at what point does someone cross from being a stranger to an acquaintance to a friend?

Would you answer that different for the face-to-face world vs. the online world?

I’ve spoken to Steve the cart returner at the grocery store thousands of times–does that make him an acquaintance?    I can’t tell you a lot of personal information about him; I know he loves stickers, but I’m not sure if he’s originally from Maryland or moved here or has siblings or is married.  But I speak with him almost daily.  Would it be crazy of me to ask him to watch the twins in the store for a second while I run to get something from the car?  At what point does a person become a trustworthy acquaintance, one that has the potential to help if you need a hand?

How does anyone get to the level of friend if you don’t start taking those small steps towards one another?  Do you need to start placing trust in the person or can you reach the level of “friend” without having that trust tested by being used?

Is friendship always a two-way street?  Can someone be a friend in my eyes but I’m an acquaintance in their eyes?  And if that is the case, can I still say that we’re friends and treat them as such?

Why do people qualify their friends beyond the explanation for how you met?  Why do people judge friendships that begin online and consider them lesser (while you and I might not feel that way, the general public does hold a myriad of opinions on online friendships)?  I knew more about Julie before we met for the first time than I do about Steve.  Had a better sense of who she was despite having more face time and extended conversations with Steve.

Why do you need to meet your online friends face-to-face before the general public accepts that friendship for its full worth?

And yet, how do you build trust with someone you’ve never seen before. Real trust–the sort that would allow you to leave your child with them unattended for a duration of time?  Can you have a deep, trust-based friendship with someone you’ve never met face-to-face?

And on that end, why do we believe that people we meet face-to-face are more trustworthy?  Date rape is more common than being attacked by someone unknown to you.  Serial killers live in communities too.  Knowing these facts, why are people more likely to trust someone they know from face-to-face contact vs. someone they’ve met online?

These were the things we discussed this weekend.  Your thoughts?

Even though I haven’t kept up my exercise blog, I still am running around WuHu Island every morning and attempting to get in better shape (I’m up to over 3 miles every day!).

I am blogging about fitness as well as participating in BlogHer’s $100 gift card sweepstakes over here.  All you need to do is click over, read my blatherings, and then answer the question to be entered.

I am going to two parties this weekend.  The first is comprised entirely of people I have known for at least eleven years.  Some for much longer than that.  We all knew each other before we met our partners and got married and had children.  It is a group that is entirely entrenched in history and we have found over the years that our roots often inadvertently entwine in the past with shared people we knew even before meeting each other.

The second is comprised almost entirely of people I know via blogging and one old camp friend who I re-met via blogging (who is different from the high school friend I re-met via Twitter–hi, Thea!).  For some, I know the intimate details of their life, but have never seen them face-to-face.  Others started out as online friends and then stepped through the computer screen.

It’s a strange continuum of old and new, but in so many permutations that old and new blend together on one extended plane.

Oh yes, and expect pictures, at least from the second one.

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Speaking of meeting bloggers, last weekend, I got to meet Flicka, Becky, and Niobe, along we other TOOTPUers who were not drenched in vomit and could therefore get together for breakfast.

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The Weekly What If (courtesy, this week, of Calliope): What if Hollywood called and wanted to turn your blog into a movie like Julie and Julia. You get final casting approval. Who would play you?

I don’t know who would play me, but I’d totally get the cast of Brothers & Sisters to play my actual family.

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And now, the blogs…

Life from Here has a post about adoption on the lead-up to her daughter’s first birthday.  Where her life was last year vs. where her life is this year.  She is thoughtful and eloquent and raises wonderful points and then meets them with possible answers.  She is most profound when she speaks about ethics and how they navigated the pre-placement months together.  I found myself nodding a lot while reading.

Relaxing Doesn’t Make Babies has an absolutely brilliant post about the worries that have been hounding her since Kate’s birth.  I love the way she describes that running anxiety: “it’s like my brain decides to suddenly worry about everything at once.”  The post flits from fear to thought to fear, and you almost enter Natalie’s brain, feeling a bit like that anxiety fluttering by like a pack of butterflies.

Waiting Lisa has a post explaining why holiday weekends are the hardest weekends and relates it to the idea of attending a family reunion.  She explains, “Parties like this are big check-ins where we are all supposed to share what has happened with us since we last got together. I have nothing. The only thing that has changed is that I’m missing organs.”  It’s a beautiful, aching post and you need to read it in full.

Lastly, Infertile Newlywed has a post about her husband’s diagnosis and the conversations that came afterward.  It is a simple post about the physical and financial realities of infertility informing the emotional side of infertility.  It is about those all-too-familiar planning conversations; the ones that go above and beyond what someone trying unassisted needs to consider just to get to the starting gate.  It’s a wonderful post.

The roundup to the Roundup: Partying this weekend.  Apparently partied last weekend too.  Answer the Weekly What If.  And lots of great posts to read.

Thank you for the birthday wishes.  We mostly celebrated my birthday last weekend since it was a long weekend. In addition to the trip to the Aquarium, Josh took me on a ghost tour in Alexandria.

He had thrown out other options for our date night—a movie, dinner at a favourite restaurant downtown, book browsing at Politics and Prose—but nothing sounded appealing. I was in a mood about turning 36 and uncomfortable in my own skin, tension-filled internal pacing (being carried out from a reclining position on the sofa because I’m not a fool—I’m not going to actually pace if I can lie down. In those cases, mental pacing suffices). I suggested the ghost tour because it gave us an excuse to drop in on friends who live in Virginia and eat at Bilbo Baggins.

Robert, the tour guide, had a tendency to mumble things quickly and then whip around and wiggle his fingers at you as his scare tactic.  Which wasn’t very scary.  His stories tended more towards campfire fare—for example, a headless, drunk colonial Alexandrian who apparently haunts dogs in case they’re the mutt who has stolen his severed head.

He ended the tour in the graveyard and ditched us—making it sound as if we’d never get out alive despite the fact that you could hear the motorcycles from Rolling Thunder a few streets away. Rather than make us quake in our Keens, it made—at least me—introspective, pausing to squint at the headstones and try to make out the names in the darkness.

We sat on a stone bench and watched other groups come into the cemetery and discuss its inhabitants. These ghosts were someone’s children. They may have been someone’s mother or father or sibling. Someone may have sat on this very bench consumed with grief after the person was gone and thought about them as they looked at their gravestone.

It’s sobering to sit in a graveyard, but it may be the only cure to feeling anxious about growing old. Disquiet loves company and sitting in the graveyard plugged me into a continuum of people who have considered their mortality—faced their mortality—and yet still the world turns.

I love the idea of ghosts. A little while after my cousin died, I noticed that different clocks in my house were exactly one hour off. One hour behind or one hour early. Different clocks in different rooms at different times. When I left for college, the same thing happened in each apartment—clocks would change, always by exactly one hour—and roommates would bitch about it, but I’d explain (like a crazy woman) that it was just my cousin, connecting with me from beyond. No explanation for why she chose to communicate through the clock, but perhaps that’s one of the easier methods to learn when you’re newly-dead. She still changes the clocks in my house to this day and I love it when it happens.

Based on this experience, my best friend and I made a list of ways we’d try to communicate with each other after we’re gone. We included a multitude of possibilities just in case some of our ideas were too difficult to learn for someone newly-dead. Josh was really upset when we informed him of our plan—thought we were morbid—but it made me feel comforted to know that even from beyond, I’d have moments where she would feel close. It makes me sick to think that there will one day be a time when we’re not able to be physically together–or to pick up the phone and call her–but I’m also well aware that there is nothing I can do to change the way life works. Ghosts are a small comfort.

I miss people who are gone too much to believe that once you are gone, you are completely gone. Losing them once was horrific enough, losing that hope is unfathomable.  It’s something I want to believe; perhaps doing so makes it true.

Do you believe that you can communicate with people who have died? And how does the idea of ghosts make you feel?

Standing in the last hours of being 35; squinting at the next year of being 36.

In Hebrew, our letters double as our numbers and each letter has a numerical value.  Sometimes numbers inadvertently form words, the most famous being “chai” or life, which is written with the same letters that are used to write “18.”

Denominations of 18 have special significance in Hebrew because they’re tied via gematria to “life” (hence why Jews often make donations or give gifts in denominations of 18).  So 36 is a special year.  Josh told me “no tears” when I started wailing a few nights about growing older as he held me on the sofa.  “This year is double life.”

For my birthday, he took me to the aquarium this past weekend and when we walked in under the waterfall and saw the trout larger than my arm swimming back and forth as we waited to get through the entrance, I knew in my bones that we had picked the perfect spot to say goodbye to being 35.

Happy birthday to me.