And then, Mondays can be unexpectedly satisfying

Especially when I top off a surprisingly productive workday by (gasp!) getting out of the house in the evening!

I know, it's shocking. I was shocked, myself. But I managed to do it. And a good thing, too, because I was getting really, really crabby. (Could you tell? From that last post? Um, maybe not; it was pretty subtle.) Thanks to Kim, who invited me to the Ayun Halliday reading, I actually went out and did a grownup thing. Jay did a great write-up of the great reading--it was all just as he says.

And not only were my new blogging friends there, but I ran into an old friend from my earliest days in Seattle, and she and her partner invited me out to dinner after, and we talked for, like, an hour! And I only monopolized about two-thirds of that time with cute little anecdotes about the Mermaid Girl. I really did try to not be a completely boring mom.

But they asked good questions. They're both really good listeners. I found myself saying things I didn't know I thought, and wanting to run home and write about them.

My friend said, "You were so shy, when you first moved here," and I said, "Well, I'm still shy, I just don't have to get out so much," and she said very definitely, "No. Not like you were then."

We talked about how people see you, and how you see yourself at different times in your life, and how you remember those times later. Like the single time I wrote about a few days ago: I have this idyllic, sepia-tinted memory of it, me roaming the streets of Seattle, carefree, alone and autonomous. But at the time I was pretty consumed with loneliness and anxiety. So what was it really like? Which layer, which version, is true, or more true?

When I got home, RW and I started talking about the different lives you can have in one lifetime. Just in her time in Seattle, she figures she's had at least three: the madrigals-singing one, and then the theater one, and then a little break, and now this mom-life that's going on five years. I had my single, bookstore-collective, knocking-around town life, and then graduate school, and now this work-and-mom-and-occasional-synagogue gig.

Both of us feel like we're heading into a new phase, somehow, this year. Looking for new things to do and to think about, meeting different people. Starting to stretch our limbs and get out into a world that's not only about parenting. Even though this is mainly a mom blog, blogging feels like part of that for me. It's exhilarating to have friends again, to connect on a regular basis with people I don't live or work with, to keep up with each other's lives and have little jokes and people we know in common.

But it's good to get out, too, and see people from my lives past and present, face to face. Ironic and nice that blogging should have led me to do that tonight.