Welcome to Long Time Friends

I admit, I've been a bit busy lately. Which is primarily why I haven't written anything in a few weeks. As time marches on, I've found that my free time is sucked up faster and faster. It can be hard to take a moment to write a blog post, let alone have a social life. 

I mentioned a few weeks (or maybe months) ago that I'd joined an art group. They meet every other week at one of the nearby libraries. It's nice and, though I'm starting to get to know the regulars, new people come each week. These are still fairly surface level acquaintances. Maybe one day, I'll have a solid group like the writer's groups I attended in New Jersey, but for now I'm content.

It's a little repetitive of me to say that making friends as an adult is hard. When I was in school, I was forced into social situations. Work is now the only full day equivalent, but there's a barrier there that didn't exist before I graduated. Schools have a defined structure between students and teachers, a structure that becomes blurred once entering the workforce. 

That doesn't mean one can't have friends at work. It just means that it's usually good to have some distance in your relationships with people at work. 

Friendships can be made or broken by distance - both physical and emotional. 

Friendship before social media.

Mostly it's the physical distance that dulls the emotional connection. I had a great group of high school friends (some of whom I do still keep in touch with), but as we all moved away from home, we stopped talking regularly. Without the constant communication, I now feel emotionally distant from them and am uncertain if my memory of them matches who they are now (and vice versa). 

Then there are the friends I have who seem to always be my friend no matter the physical distance. I have a couple of friends I might not see for years and only shoot the occasional text to, but put me in a room with them and it's like we haven't been a apart for a day.

Then again, this could be a perception only from my end. It does take two people to maintain a relationship. 

Not too long ago, my family lost one of our long time friends. My dad met this friend in the early 80s (it might have been the 70s, but I can't be certain). This was well into their adult lives. This family friend was close enough, that he became an honorary uncle when I came around about 20 years later and was my sibling's godparent. 

My dad and his friend were from two different generations (my dad is a Boomer, while this friend was from the Silent Generation). I was friends with his grandkids rather than his kids. This friendship lasted over four decades, multiple states, and a couple of different countries. They even did become work colleagues for a bit.

My honorary uncle taught me how to ride a bike, cut down a Christmas tree, and drive a standard stick shift convertible. He even let me borrow that convertible for a summer while I was a nanny. There was no air conditioning, I sometimes had to pump air in the tires using a bike pump, and the gas gage would start to swivel at the 1/2 tank mark. My friends called that car Butch. It's one of my fondest memories of my uncle. 

Sometimes friendships withstand the test of time and distance. I have a few I hope last that long (hopefully longer). 

I miss my uncle. In some childish way, I thought he'd be around forever.

But I'm happy for the long time friendship he had with my family. 

Until next week. 

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Welcome to Returning to My Inner Poet

I used to write a lot of poetry. I had a journal in high school that I would write in nearly every night. It was filled with the start of short stories, silly poems, and nonsensical doodles. I still have this journal and occasionally have a good laugh going through it.

I wonder if he ever regretted any of his early poetry?

Poetry was a fun hobby in high school. It was part of my whole: "I'm going to be a famous writer/artist someday" shtick that I try to pretend didn't exist (yeah, high school me was an interesting person). They were short, easy to write, and my creative writing teacher always wanted poems for the literary magazine. I think I had four or five poems and a couple of drawings published before I graduated.

Then I just stopped writing poems.

I don't really remember why I stopped. I think I took a few years of writing off all together in college, until I was blackmailed talked into writing fan-fiction.

I seem to recall having a poetry writing assignment my freshmen year of college. I was pretty sick when I was told to write a sonnet and don't remember many details. However, I do remember my professor saying that the poem I wrote was prefect mathematically, but otherwise sucked.

Meh, I was never a huge fan of sonnets anyway. I liked haiku and limericks a lot more. They're playful and funny.

So nearly a decade has gone by and I haven't written a single poem. And then I have a really bad month. Not bad like bad things keep happening to me, but bad as in my mental health wasn't in the best shape. I keep trying to find the right way to describe what I'm feeling and I lost a lot of interest in writing.

Finally I managed to put some thoughts on paper. Just a couple of rhyming lines that wouldn't make much sense to someone casually glancing at them. A few more weeks go by and I go back to those lines and add a few more. Suddenly I had a poem that helped me describe what I was feeling.

I didn't do anything with the poem. It's been sitting in a notebook for the better part of a year now. I've been focusing on short stories and novel writing.

Then I make a new friend at one of my writers groups who loves to write poetry. We actually have similar stories when it comes to writing poetry. We wrote a lot in high school and then stopped writing for one reason or another only to start writing years later. They've asked me to help out proofreading some of their work that they have on Wattpad (a website where you can post original works for people to read).

When they started sharing their poetry with me, it was like a switch had been flipped. I started writing more poetry. It's still slow and they probably aren't the best poems (not by a long shot), but I'm finding that I really enjoy it.

I might do a few more posts on poetry and see about posting some of my poems here. April is National Poetry Month, so I'm either really late or seriously early to celebrate. But why should I only celebrate poetry once a month?

Until next week.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.