Amber L. Carter's Blog, page 68
February 28, 2012
February 27, 2012
Cords.
I missed Holly's Last Night Out. And I haven't seen the full crew of Bausch and Slawson in over a month, probably longer. And everything seems to fall on the weekend that you're going to be out of town.
Catching up on my Tumblr feed tonight, I felt the first real pangs of remorse for having moved up here. It was fleeting and temporary - I know I made the right choice - but something about something someone wrote made me wonder if I had stayed too long. If the connections had become too frayed to ever pull tight again. I remembered standing on a sidewalk a couple of years ago and inwardly scoffing at the news from one of my best friends that he barely heard from another friend now that they had moved across the country. "It would never be like that, with us," I remembered thinking. "If I moved or if he moved, we would text and email and visit all the time." Nope. They were busy and I was busy, and... I used to get really irritated with friends whom I felt had that "out of sight, out of mind" mentality. Now sometimes I wonder if that's now me...I get so distracted and swept up and buried under sometimes. And I worry about being a good friend, because I don't always do a perfect job even though it's far and away one of the most important things in my entire life. Friendship. It's weird, right? Autumn and I can go years without seeing each other and months without talking, yet by the time we've finished saying "hello" on the phone it feels like she's sitting right across from me and no time has passed at all. And I'm lucky, for that and for her, as well as for the other friendships I have that carry that same, always-bonded quality.
And then there's other friends that I get irritated with because they give me guilt trips about being gone but seem to have yet to realize that the gates to the North are not locked and that they let just about anyone into the city limits of Hayward and Cable these days, and so if they miss me that much, maybe instead of nagging me about my next visit they can come and see me this time. And that's the part that stings, you know? Because it could go either way: It could either make you realize the hard truth about you and them - that maybe you're not really as close as you thought, maybe they're more important to you than you are to them, and is that okay? Is that how you want it? Or should this be a clearing out, a resolution, a making way for a new friendship where you don't have to ask that question? - or it could be an opening of the eyes...a realization that, for every friend who is wonderfully patient and forgiving of you, there's another that you have to be that way with, too.
I guess the bottom line is, I miss my friends. And I hate missing out, with them. In the swirl and fervor and the "God! I'm gone again that weekend!" of February, I am so excited to come home on Thursday and be home. Stay home. Get back to weekday happy hours and Friday nights out and weekend brunches with friends. I know it won't look like it used to...but nothing in my life looks like it used to. And with as happy as I've been with that, I gotta believe that I'll be happy with this, too.
Catching up on my Tumblr feed tonight, I felt the first real pangs of remorse for having moved up here. It was fleeting and temporary - I know I made the right choice - but something about something someone wrote made me wonder if I had stayed too long. If the connections had become too frayed to ever pull tight again. I remembered standing on a sidewalk a couple of years ago and inwardly scoffing at the news from one of my best friends that he barely heard from another friend now that they had moved across the country. "It would never be like that, with us," I remembered thinking. "If I moved or if he moved, we would text and email and visit all the time." Nope. They were busy and I was busy, and... I used to get really irritated with friends whom I felt had that "out of sight, out of mind" mentality. Now sometimes I wonder if that's now me...I get so distracted and swept up and buried under sometimes. And I worry about being a good friend, because I don't always do a perfect job even though it's far and away one of the most important things in my entire life. Friendship. It's weird, right? Autumn and I can go years without seeing each other and months without talking, yet by the time we've finished saying "hello" on the phone it feels like she's sitting right across from me and no time has passed at all. And I'm lucky, for that and for her, as well as for the other friendships I have that carry that same, always-bonded quality.
And then there's other friends that I get irritated with because they give me guilt trips about being gone but seem to have yet to realize that the gates to the North are not locked and that they let just about anyone into the city limits of Hayward and Cable these days, and so if they miss me that much, maybe instead of nagging me about my next visit they can come and see me this time. And that's the part that stings, you know? Because it could go either way: It could either make you realize the hard truth about you and them - that maybe you're not really as close as you thought, maybe they're more important to you than you are to them, and is that okay? Is that how you want it? Or should this be a clearing out, a resolution, a making way for a new friendship where you don't have to ask that question? - or it could be an opening of the eyes...a realization that, for every friend who is wonderfully patient and forgiving of you, there's another that you have to be that way with, too.
I guess the bottom line is, I miss my friends. And I hate missing out, with them. In the swirl and fervor and the "God! I'm gone again that weekend!" of February, I am so excited to come home on Thursday and be home. Stay home. Get back to weekday happy hours and Friday nights out and weekend brunches with friends. I know it won't look like it used to...but nothing in my life looks like it used to. And with as happy as I've been with that, I gotta believe that I'll be happy with this, too.
February 23, 2012
Monsterbeard : Last night I got to that part in Storm of Swords
Monsterbeard : Last night I got to that part in Storm of Swords:
Like with most popular books (Harry Potter, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, etc), I'm purposefully late to the game with The Game of Thrones (I have this weird thing where I don't like to read a popular book that everyone else is reading because it kind of feels like participating in crowd hysteria, so I like to wait until the fury has died down and then I'll pick it up, read it in peace, and then bug everyone else with my old news about how good it is). In fact, I just started it last night! The reading of this book comes after a viewing of the last half of the first episode about a year ago (all I seem to remember, though, is that everyone in the realm seemed to really like doing it from behind. Seriously. There were, like, three sex scenes back-to-back where everyone was doing The Quarterback. Which, curiously enough, is only talked about once during that specific part of the book - and abstractly, I might add - so I wonder if maybe the writing team at HBO is predominantly male, maybe?) and after reading an article about how, as a writer, you can't let yourself get too close to your characters, aka Martin.
So I knew people were gonna die. And yet I was still upset when it started to happen. Not too upset, however, that I'm going to stop reading it. And especially not now, because now I have to see what it is that happens in Storm of Swords that made you so upset, Monsterbeard! Now I have to get to that part and figure out what you're talking about! Don't you see? NOW YOU'VE JUST MADE IT WORSE WITH YOUR CURSED FORESHADOWING!
I bet you guys can't even wait until I start The Hunger Games trilogy!
And nobody told me. Nobody freaking told me and I was really upset and wanted to keep reading to see if it was a trick but it wasn't a trick. And it was the middle of the night of course so I had to hold it all in.
I'm glad nobody told me but I kind of wish when I had started the series someone would have said "Hey, listen, don't do this to yourself. There are too many pages and too many characters, and too many die and there's nothing you can do." Why don't we tell people that when they say they're reading Game of Thrones?!
Like with most popular books (Harry Potter, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, etc), I'm purposefully late to the game with The Game of Thrones (I have this weird thing where I don't like to read a popular book that everyone else is reading because it kind of feels like participating in crowd hysteria, so I like to wait until the fury has died down and then I'll pick it up, read it in peace, and then bug everyone else with my old news about how good it is). In fact, I just started it last night! The reading of this book comes after a viewing of the last half of the first episode about a year ago (all I seem to remember, though, is that everyone in the realm seemed to really like doing it from behind. Seriously. There were, like, three sex scenes back-to-back where everyone was doing The Quarterback. Which, curiously enough, is only talked about once during that specific part of the book - and abstractly, I might add - so I wonder if maybe the writing team at HBO is predominantly male, maybe?) and after reading an article about how, as a writer, you can't let yourself get too close to your characters, aka Martin.
So I knew people were gonna die. And yet I was still upset when it started to happen. Not too upset, however, that I'm going to stop reading it. And especially not now, because now I have to see what it is that happens in Storm of Swords that made you so upset, Monsterbeard! Now I have to get to that part and figure out what you're talking about! Don't you see? NOW YOU'VE JUST MADE IT WORSE WITH YOUR CURSED FORESHADOWING!
I bet you guys can't even wait until I start The Hunger Games trilogy!
