For my 33rd birthday this year, I decided to make the trip, long-overdue, to Seattle to visit an old friend. Recently, another old friend told me that I'm not the friend who will drive slower when told that a passenger has lived through an automobile collision. I'm the friend who laughs driving down old New Deal era parkways at break-neck speed (and turns off the headlights). I'm not the friend who coddles. I'm the devil's advocate, loving and caring but pushing and pulling.
Sometimes I wonder if I stopped, if I'd have any friends anymore or if I only know how to have relationships with people who are in transition. It worried me that my friend who lives in Seattle wasn't calling with dramatic tales about campaign life or her romantic dalliances. I wondered if all I was good for, for her, was a sounding board. The woman I befriended nearly a decade ago was brave and adventurous, tenacious, principled, passionate, and smart as a whip. She was also existentially transitioning from heterosexual to homosexual and going to graduate school for religion in the public square.
In the past decade she's moved from DC to Wilmington NC to home to New Jersey to Lynchburg VA to Seattle. She's been in give serious relationships and has been employed by nine different organizations (some concurrently). That's a lot of living to do.
And she's figured it out. She has the most amazing aura of self-actualization and acceptance. She's her own boss in a perfect-for-her relationship, is always late, has created a cozy inner circle of friends, and still builds her relationships with her family back home. She's a highly sensitive person and needs food or else gets the Hanger, and appreciates high-threadcount sheets.
After visiting, I've found, she doesn't need me anymore, and if she and I met today, I don't know if we'd be as fast of friends as we were nine years ago.
For the life of me, I can't remember why I put ice skating in CANADA on my list. But there it is. Seattle is a few hours south of Vancouver, British Columbia. So I thought that I'd go visit and we could go ice skating together. Because really, this list is just an excuse to see friends and do random things (the more absurd, the better).
Since living in Seattle, my brave, tenacious friends has become very risk-averse when it comes to personal safety... which she neglected to tell me when I told her the main objective of the trip north. She also neglected to tell me just how scared she was that she wouldn't be allowed to cross the Canadian border... Had she told me these aversion, I may have asked someone else to go with me to Toronto some other time or maybe I'd go to Mont Trem Blanc with Tiffany for the Team in Training Iron Man in August (shameless plug here...)
I still would have gone to Seattle, maybe our day trip could have been to Portland or to the water or to FORKS (TwiHard for lyfe)!
Maybe that's the reason she hasn't returned my texts or calls. This trip wasn't exactly as either of us had planned, which, in and of itself is interesting. The point of the leap list is to live and experience and be conscious. This might not have been the most pleasant trip, but it fulfilled the purpose of the list. Makes me think that I have an expectation that the items on my list will be intrinsically pleasant. But that's not the point, and its not accurate or reasonable to expect that all the time. Its nice to be able to step back and appreciate an unpleasant experience.
Speaking of, let's discuss Seattle Freeze. On Sunday morning, I woke up early to go visit my friends Marc and Perry in North Seattle. I planned on taking the bus, found the map and the schedule online. My friend had directed me to some places to go for coffee the night before when she dropped me off. Not further than a block from the bus stop was a restaurant called Liberty, it had an "Open" sign in the window, so I walked in. I was greeted with a wolf-whistle. I looked around and around for the source, very curious, because it wasn't even 8AM and I'm just not used to such nascent cat-calls.
In the back of the restaurant, sitting in a booth with an open laptop, was a woman with short hair, shrunken cheeks, and a pinched face. Next to her was a pink cockatoo bobbing his head up and down, whistling still, and flaring his feathers. Seattle became a million times more awesome in a nanosecond.
this is a pink cockatoo (and Cee lo Green).
I ordered my coffee, and while I was waiting for the barista, walked towards the woman and her bird in the back booth. She opened her mouth and the image of Seattle plummeted. Very defensively, she told me she was too busy to talk, even before I said anything and when I turned my attention to her avian friend, she explained that he was NOT to be bothered.
PSA: If you bring a conversation piece into a public place, you forfeit any expectation of privacy. People are going to want to talk to you, not because they are cow-towing to an implicit call for attention but because we are inherently curious creatures. Don't take it personally, I just wanted to admire your bird, Lady.
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