On "Friends"

Last night was pretty great. I went downtown to see a rock show all on my own, which is not something that I usually do. I usually roll with my homies, the quiet one among a group of confident, artsy, funny friends. But I just haven't been feeling as friendly as usual lately, if you couldn't tell by some of my blog posts. 

I find that when I do go out on my own, without anyone to tell me that they'd rather to this, or go there - I have a better time, and I find (maybe not better, but maybe) different people to hang out with that I normally would not. Working for Daryl's campaign over the summer made me lots of new aquaintences that are quickly becoming new friends, and the time I spend with them is fun and free of drama and hangups and the weight of everything that has happened in the past - because we have no past. It's so unbelievably refreshing to spend time with people who I don't have grudges or baggage or bad thoughts between. With new friends, it's hope and fun and positivity all the way, and lately I've been doing everything I can to seek out new experiences with new people. 

See, I've never fancied myself a good friend. I can't even hide that fact about me. When things get tough, I often get going, and it is nothing to be proud of, so at least, I feel, that if I own up to it and don't try to hide it or deny it, I save at least a little bit of face. However - and here's the catch - it's not that I jump ship from friends when things get tough for THEM - I do it when it's tough for me. 

The truth of it is, I just have a very narrow personal definition of what a friend is, and it's very self-centered and selfish:

Friend: (n) 1. Someone who you enjoy spending time with. 2. Someone who never makes you feel bad about yourself.

It's simple, really. I'm ditching "friends" to make my life better and more enjoyable for me. In the last few years, there have been a lot of people in my life who I've spent time with and called friends, but I never felt that closeness, love, and yes, devotion, the way I feel those things for Alisha and Brian. Oftentimes I've sat in houses and at bars surrounded by "friends" wishing I were someplace else entirely. I haven't enjoyed the time I spent with them. I am so terribly sick of feeling like time has been wasted with people I didn't want to be spending it with.

And worse? I've had "friends" who have kept me up at night with memories of things they said about me or other people I care about - ugly, hateful things. I've had "friends" who can't get themselves out of their own judgy pants, who seem to glow in the hot light of putting other people down. And really, that is what gets me the most. If you make a joke, even if you are "just kidding" and "don't mean it" - but if you say things and they hurt, and you laugh and I balk? Are you a friend? 

No. Not by my definition. 

Alisha and I spend more time together than I've spent with any other person in my adult life, Brian is the only other one who comes close, and now Dan, Alisha's husband, has become another person who I've grown close to and consider to be a real friend. 

With Alisha, I can reach back into a decade of memories - ten years of memories with a person I have always been close to and cared for - and can I can count on one hand the times she has actually made me upset and feel bad. Once, I was very upset over something that was going on with Elise when she was a baby, and Alisha said something that seemed at the time to belittle my personal plight. I was mad, I was annoyed, but I forgave her. It was a misunderstanding. Then there was that time she started a book club and held the meetings on Mondays when she knew I couldn't go because I had Elise, was raising her by myself and couldn't leave my house at night. That annoyed the shit out of me, and the only reason I never made a big deal out of it is because the book club fizzled out after one book. Years later, after I brought it up, she apologized to me for that. She didn't realize at the time, she says, that I wouldn't be able to make it. I forgave her. Obviously. Then there was the time she had this crazy potentially catastrophic thing going on in her life and she waited nearly a week to tell me about it - and of course after I'd already found out most of the details. In a way, I was hurt that she didn't come to me, but at the same time, I knew exactly why she didn't - because she already knew what my reaction would be to her news and she knew exactly what I would have to say, and she was right. 

There are no jokes at my expense. There are no behind the back complaints or shit-talking. There is no hurt, no shame, no resentment, and no anger between us, and that is why we've been friends for ten years. 

One of these days I am going to have to publish a manifesto: I'm sorry, people I've called friends. I was just kidding. I'd rather not see you all anymore. 

Until then, I guess, until I own up to this and have the talks I need to have with people to peacably and hopefully not painfully remove them from my life - I guess until then I'll just remember the smiles and the laughter and the fun I have with people who don't have that word "friend" attached to them. They are just beings flitting through my life, making me happy with their lives. It's what I like right now.

Baby Bean

Alisha called me tonight and I followed her to the hospital because she was having some bleeding. I tried to stay calm for her,  which is ironic since Alisha's house could be on fire and she would just shrug and say "Eh, we'll deal with it later," and I was doing a great job until we got into the ultrasound room. Her husband Dan was still at work and couldn't be there, so I went in to hold her hand and be her moral support, as best friends are wont to do.

The ultrasound technician lowered the lights in the room and began roaming around on her belly, looking at things. I've been party to a few baby ultrasounds, and when he stopped his routine and I hadn't seen that little white bean floating in a sea of black like I knew I SHOULD be seeing, I panicked. But see, Alisha couldn't see the screen like I had seen it, and I couldn't be the one to tell her what I had seen, or in this case, NOT seen. The technician said he was going to come back in a few minutes and do an internal ultrasound, and then he turned the lights back up and left the room.

"Cheney, your face is on fire," Alisha said, and I realized that in those few minutes my blood pressure had probably skyrocketed as it tends to do when I am really stressed out. My mouth was dry, my head was pounding, and yes, it felt like blood was just going to seep through the pores of my face. I could see my reflection in the metal paper towel holder on the wall, and I am surprised that no one admitted me to the ER at that point. 

"I'm freaking out," I admitted. "Someone needs to panic!" 

She asked me if I had seen anything, and I just, well, lied. "I don't know what I'm looking at," I told her, and shrugged. But inside I was panicking.

The technician came back and began the internal ultrasound, and again Alisha couldn't see what I was seeing on the screen. I just held her hand and tried to stay calm as I reported to her what I was seeing, since the tech didn't have much in the way of a bedside manner.

"You have a right ovary," I told her. "Oh, look, you have a left ovary, too."

Then there it was. A little white blob in its little sea of black. "Yolk sac" the tech typed onto the screen as he took measurements. "Gestational sac," he continued, and then he focused on the white, spidery looking baby bean, and I held my breath until I saw what I needed to see. The rapid flickering of it's itty bitty little heart.

 

It took a while for my blood pressure to drop, for my head to stop pounding. But we needed to see that, and I felt much better when I was able to walk out into the waiting room and retrieve Dan, and then the three of us waited together.

I can't remember the technical term for things, but apparently there is a small hemmorage between the placenta and the uterus. It COULD heal, the doctor said. But, she COULD miscarry. They told her to call her doctor first thing in the morning and to come back if things got worse. 

I guess, no matter what, the future is totally uncertain for us all, and sometimes you just have to let the worry go and hold on to the love. 

Tomorrow is another day. But tonight, there's still that two centimeter long baby bean, its heart beating furiously in the belly of my best friend, and I am so totally in love with it already. 

The Aftermath of the Afterbirth

Remember this post about the stuff in the jar that wasn't beef jerky?

Well, after storing the dried up placenta bits in the fridge, the pill capsules finally arrived in the mail and Alisha commenced with the encapsulation last night. It took a few tries with a few different food processors, but eventually that placenta turned to dust as it was wont to do.

I didn't get to watch the entire process of getting all of that placenta powder into the pills, but I did have the pleasure of witnessing the first attempt at processing it, and kids? Don't try this at home. Just have Alisha do it for you. So, before, it had been reported that cooking placenta smells like liver. Dried placenta? Smells like mushrooms. Just. Like. Mushrooms.

So, I guess the first of Alisha's placenta encapsulations has been a success, and now she is going to offer to do it for friends and friends of friends, and maybe even think about renting a place where she can have a real business doing this, because apparently this is a thing people like to do. Yeah.

So. That's all I have to say about that. 

And if you are wondering what the background to these pictures is? Those are my D&D papers from the game I was playing last night, and the sweet boat that Dan made for last night's encounter. Oops, I did it again. Ship. The sweet SHIP he made. 

Luckily, I have a few more D&D pictures to share with you tomorrow, the day I will offically have kicken NaBloPoMo's ass.

That's Not Beef Jerky

 

If you saw this in someone's refrigerator, you might think it's a mason jar filled with beef jerky. Or maybe some dried mushrooms, because it looks like either of those things, in my opinion. 

But you would be wrong to think that.

That, my friends, is a human placenta, dried and ready for encapsulation.

Why am I holding a jar of someone's dried up placenta, you may ask? Because my best friend is a little bit nutty. By which I mean, a little bit crunchy. She's decided to get into the business of encapsulating placentas for consumption. You might want to go to that link for some less biased information, but really, the jist of it is, eating your placenta after birth (after birth, get it? HAR DE HAR HAR) has many health benefits for the mother. When Alisha found out she was pregnant for the second time this past month, she started looking in to doing this for herself, but wanted to practice before her own birth so she knew how the process worked. 

Long story short, she was able to aquire a friend of a friend's placenta. When I heard of this, I balked. "YOU HAVE SOMEONE'S PLACENTA IN YOUR FREEZER?" I asked her, but by that point it was actually thawing out in her fridge. I walked to the fridge and pulled it open and gingerly picked up the BIOHAZARD bag that was sitting next to her egg carton and had myself a little chuckle as the umbilical cord slid to the bottom of the bag. This girl's placenta was WAAAAAY smaller than mine.

The encapsulating process starts with cooking. Apparently you cut off the cord, wrap the placenta in the amniotic sac, and steam it. Then, you slow cook it in the oven for a number of hours until you get what you see in the jars up there - dried out placenta jerky. In a day or two, once her empty pill capsules come in the mail, she'll throw that placenta in her food processor and grind it to dust to be put into pills and finally given back to its original... grower. 

Yeah.

I knew right off the bat that I was declining her dinner invitation for this past Sunday when she was cooking the thing. First of all, there was no way in hell I'd be eating anything with meat in it that day, lest she decide to play a little trick on me. But then there was the matter of the smell.

"I bet it will smell like liver!" I told her, knowing full well from personal experience that a placenta is just a big old bag of blood. And what do you know? I was right. Cooking placenta DOES SMELL JUST LIKE LIVER. 

Too bad you can't add any onions to round out the awesome. 

So yeah. Once again NaBloPoMo is a win for the day, because I haven't gotten anywhere close to sleep even though it's two in the morning. I've been too busy, you know, with this here placenta that doesn't belong to me. 

Good times, good times.

Mr. Mayor

I wrote at length last month about how I got involved with Daryl's campaign for Mayor of New London, Connecticut, and this past Tuesday all of the hard work involved by me and hundreds of other campaigners came to an end. I already spoiled the ending to this story - he won, but there is so much more to it than that - so much, unfortunately, that I feel like the ship has already sailed when it comes to recapping it all and giving myself a definitive record for what this has meaned to me and others. (I am trying SO hard to be better at this.)

Last Thursday, I wrote Daryl a letter and addressed it to his house, hoping he would get it and have a chance to read it before election day. Daryl's husband, Todd, assured me that he DID get my letter on Monday and was very touched and didn't really know what to say to me in thanks. It was a serious letter.

I wrote to him that, in a nutshell, joining his campaign as a volunteer has completely changed my life. And it has, that is true. It really has. 

I've been "political" for quite some time, as you might notice once in a while on m Tumblr, and by the lineup of classes I took when I was in college. Had I continued with school, I would certainly have wanted to transfer to get a degree in either American Studies or Poly Sci, because that is just what I am interested the most in, besides writing, of course. But I dropped out, and that's another story.

ANYWAY, I had never worked on a campaign before. I never knew how exciting and thrilling it could really be. I guess I just never believed that hard work could be rewarded in such a way as to prove that this world is a magical place filled with like minds and love that are hidden in plain sight, and are hidden in abundance. Yeah, the letter I wrote was wishy-washy and maybe a little bit weird, and selfish, too. Really, it was me telling Daryl what his campaign meant to me, and likewise what he meant to so many young people in New London. 

I told him that whether or not he won the election, he'd already won in my eyes, and the eyes of his supporters. He'd already brought change to New London by making so many people open their eyes and wake up to the issues and for the first time actually DO SOMETHING about them. That's a victory that anyone would be proud of, in my opinion. 

Here are Alisha and I on primary night, which was September 13th. Alisha is being lifted up off the ground by a little old dude named Jake, and I'm about to be enveloped by Laura - both of whom we met in just the first few days of campaigning. Now I call Jake and Laura friends, because they are, because they are our people - like so many others - the first gift that Daryl gave me. 

That's what I'm not about to get over. Here we were, Alisha and I, exhausted after being out holding signs, waving at cars, hoping that people were going to the polls to vote for the man we thought would be the best in charge. We didn't have to do it, we didn't get paid for it, but we did it anyway, with so many other smart, thoughtful, compassionate beautiful people that are now friends, literally, for life. There's something about standing on streetcorners with people that gives you a bond like no other - I can't really explain it, but finding a common bond between strangers, striving for a common goal just DOES SOMETHING to people. It pulls them together, and as crunchy as this sounds, I feel like it pulls our energy together, too, like we are one person, one big Finiziatic. Here's the funny thing about this picture - we were waiting at a bar downtown for Daryl to come in and announce whether he won the primary or not. We were just happy to be there together. And then? Then there was this moment:

And the rest became my history. I went to all the forums for city council and Board of Ed. I went to a Democratic Town Commitee meeting, I went to the mayor forums, I went to the debates, I went to nearly every event that Daryl participated in in the following months. I got to know his platform like the back of my hand so that when I wore my button in public and people asked me about him, I could give an intelligent and thoughtful answer - and then give them the button right off my shirt.

I stood on streetcorners in the dark with other like-minded "crazies" getting high off the honks and thumbs up that we got, even as my toes started to freeze and my nose started to drip.

I posted constantly in our volunteer group on Facebook, reminding people about events and getting more people to volunteer. 

I went down to the Democratic Town Commitee Headquarters and made phone calls to voters, reminding them about the elections and offering rides to the polls, then setting up transportation for a bunch of elderly people who otherwise would not have made it.

On Monday night, I played my first game of Dungeons & Dragons, and then dragged Brian out with me to conduct a super secret stealthy mission of hanging Finzio door hangers on the doors of strangers, hoping they will come out and vote for Daryl in the morning.

And then the day came. I had already told my boss I wouldn't be coming to work, and I got up Tuesday morning, dressed in two pairs of pants, two pairs of socks, three layers and stepped out the door, only to find that the day had dawned bright and beautiful, and unseasonably HOT for November, and had to go change all of my clothes again. I dropped off a tuna noodle salad at Daryl's house, and got my butt down to Harbor School where I stood with my sign, waving at cars for four hours straight until I finally broke for some food and a sit down, but was back at it again right after, and aside for an hour when I went to go pick up my friend Brad so that I could bring him out to the polls to vote, I was on corners all day, surrounded by strangers who had become friends, surrounded by other campaigners who were rooting for the other guy (and giving us serious anxiety due to the sheer number of them) but I was out there all day. And it was one of the most exciting, rewarding, and best days of my life. 

At eight o'clock, we were down at Dev's on Bank, the restaurant hosting Daryl's election night party. I piled in there with friends, old, new, best, and hardly, there had to be a few hundred of us in a room meant for far fewer, and I chugged, I mean CHUGGED a beer and sat down in one of the few chairs on the side of the room. I sat there, slightly moaning, my feet screaming at me for standing on them all day, which i something I am not used to - and then my friend Natalie came up to me.

Natalie had been the one to gather the premiliminary votes from Harbor School, where we had been at most of the day. Harbor was one of three polling locations, and Daryl's numbers there were staggering. I don't remember them exactly, but he had some 800 votes at that school and the closest competitor had less than 400. And in that moment, I knew we'd won. WE WON.

You might be able to watch Daryl's victory speech here, but I will embed it once it's on YouTube. He thanked everyone, he reminded people that we ran a clean campaign that didn't owe anyone anything, and reminded us also that this was only the beginning - there is so much more work to be done. I'll have to watch the video again myself, because his words were lost in a blur of hugs and kisses and cheers - and then we went downstairs to the bar to party.

I was jammed in with friends and other campaigners, brushing up with former mayors and current State Representatives, getting beers bought for me and Dan by a guy who turns out to be the guy who just might be New London's next Superintendent of schools (shhhh) and then I stole a moment with Todd.

Aren't we just precious? Todd is Daryl's husband, and one of the things I neglected to blog about in the last month and a half is that Todd is one of the best new friends I have made in years. We met one night after some event, I can't even remember now whether it was a forum or debate, and he leaned over a table to me and said "I want to party with you," and what better way could a friendship begin? He came to Alisha's a week later and we drinked and ate the night away, and it turns out that Todd and I have more things in common than I do with most people I've met in years, including a love of books (particularly YA paranormal!) and writing, and learning, and television (particularly soap operas!) and generally having a good time. While I value all of the friendships I've made over the course of the campaign, I feel like Daryl running for mayor has next to nothing why Todd and I are really friends now, if you know what I mean. You know those people that you meet and they just feel like old friends? That's Todd. 

I just wanted to share that picture because it's adorable and leads me to the end of my story. At Dev's on election night, I gave Daryl a quick hug and congratulated him, got a nice picture taken with him that I've yet to see posted on Facebook, and we parted ways. He's a busy busy man. 

Last night, I went over to Todd & Daryl's house to exhange books with Todd and catch up on American Horror Story with him. In the course of the evening, we got a little tipsy, and then started munching on leftover election day date bread - I INSISTED that it would be better toasted with butter, so Todd dragged a little geriatric toaster that looks like it was made in the forties down from a shelf and got me going - so there I was, bleary eyed and peckish in my socks, waiting for my toast to toast, and Daryl walks in with his new exectutive assistant and transistion team leader. 

He looked at me, he laughed at me, and then he put his hands on my shoulders and leaned in to look me in the eyes. 

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you." 

But I shot those words right back at him. How could I not, for what meeting him has brought into my life? How could I ever stop thanking someone, or start repaying someone, for such irreplacable gifts?

Grace in Small Things # 4

1.) That Elise had a blast trick-or-treating as Cinderella, even though our plans with friends fell through and it was just the two of us - actually, that made it better, in my opinion.

2.) Being ahead of the game in this years NaNoWriMo, even though I totally didn't do any writing on Saturday.

3.) The weather was good this week - we didn't get anymore freak snowstorms. I am more grateful for this than you would believe.

4.) Being so excited (and so confident) about election day coming up on Tuesday.

5.) Alisha is pregnant again. YES!!

... And Five.

When you are supposed to blog every day, I feel that good writing, if that is what I do here at all on a regular basis, which I am not sure about - falls by the wayside. 

The truth is, it's Saturday, I was out and about with my mom and Elise all day, and now I have just stopped home long enough to get a little post up and change my clothes before going out tonight.

I guess this is more about endurance than eloquence, right?

Here's a picture of me and my best friend Alisha dressed up as zombie bride & bridesmaid for last weekend's halloween party:

I just love us.