Things are shaping up to be pretty odd

Whew. What a week. So many times I sat down to write and couldn't because there's always a distraction - a phone call, a student stopping by, an eye-rolling, hip-shifting teenage daughter, a grumpy hubby, or the perpetual lure of Facebook.

I went last night to my good friend Sarah's birthday party; she's a whopping 30 and while I contend that age is but a number, I looked at the pictures of myself from said party, and for perhaps the first time in my life, I appeared old and this disturbed me. Still disturbs me. I have no intention whatsoever of growing old gracefully - Botox and plastic surgery are in my future and I make no apology for it. Nevertheless, what strikes me at the same time is that I feel as though I've lived so many entire lives in the space of my life that I should in fact be much older than I am. One of Sarah's friends is a guy named Anton, whom I recognized immediately as a person from my hazy past. He's the friend and former roommate of a group of people I ran with six or so years ago when I was in the post-asshole, post-MA, what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life phase. No one ever tells you that what you are going to "do" with your life is a perpetual re-negotiation process, no matter what your education level.

We hung out at in a dive bar on Colfax, and while I told myself at the time I was doing it in order to write a story, there was also part of me that was just plain slumming, and I won't lie - it was fun to hang out with a bunch of drunks and aimless individuals who talked about nothing and whose only goals were to make enough money during the day (legally or not) to spend the evening at said bar. Quite the contrast to the pretention of graduate school, let me tell you. I guess I dated Anton's friend - but it wasn't really dating so much as it was hanging out and having sex occasionally because I never felt a single thing for him other than pity for his wasted intelligence and nowhere life. Funny thing is, that part of my life ended abruptly and went on to other matters, like Jamison and new friends, and a new graduate program. I closed the book on them - all of them - because after a bit we had nothing to talk about. Every once in a while I will get a random phone call and it feels strange, like a past life coming to call. Seeing Anton was no different, except that seeing him is not and was not the issue.

My friend Sarah is the inspiration for a character in my current novel project. Even though the character is also named Sarah, it's important that I distinguish it's only loosely based on the real Sarah. The stories that I wrote about that group of people in that bar years ago were recently excavated from an old hard drive and I discovered that I really liked some of the pieces. I assigned them to the character Sarah because it seemed like a good fit for her subplot. I'm happy with it and so on, but the odd thing is that Anton is one of the characters in those stories and now so is Sarah, and last night I found out that they are good friends in real life. How strange is that?

Of course I know that Denver is a small town comparatively, but the fact that it shrinks almost around me at times is unnerving. Like the person I know in London who is married to a Scotsman who dated one of my good friends a decade ago and I'd never met her. Or how Jamison spent nearly nine years working and living only steps away from me in a host of places and we never met, but once we did, it was instant and permanent for us to be together. Six degrees of separation? It's more like two at any given moment in my world, it seems. I guess the one nice thing was that Anton didn't recognize me even when I said I knew him - it was much later when he approached me and said he remembered, but that it wasn't fair to him that I had changed so much. He said "every single thing I remember about you is different" and I'm certain he had no idea what a compliment it was to me, but when I commented on the fact that I'd changed my hair and glasses, and so on, he interjected with "but you look really great. And happy." From a person who knew me (even if only on a superficial level) at one of the lowest points of my life to date to say this has given me a solid sense of joy today. Go figure.