Friday as planned I made it over to Linda’s with only minimal delay, considering it was pouring down rain the entire drive over. That, in fact, was a theme this weekend: Chiara Driving Her Car In The Pouring Down Rain And Discovering She Doesn’t Totally Know How To Vent Her Car Even Though She’s Had It For What, Eight Years Now? The promised croissant French toast, ensuing gossip, and ministrations of both Riley (grunty and smiley!) and Dog (also grunty and smiley!) eased the soggy pain and I remembered how much I like being at Linda’s house. I just kind of like her living room, with its nice leather couches and pretty things on the walls. She makes me tea and talks to be about our little corner of the internet as well as the big things, like life and relationships and parenthood and non-parenthood and everything in between, and I always feel smarter and funnier and awesomer in general after I’ve had a chat over tea with her. It’s made me realize how I’ve missed our hole-in-the-wall pho lunches on the Ave since she went on maternity leave, and made me wish for my own house with nice red walls and a pumpkin patch out back, too. Do you have a friend like her? Oh, you should totally get one. They are great.
From Bellevue it was a long slow hour of torture on the 405 before I got through some of the traffic in the POURING DOWN RAIN only to find some more traffic on the 5. Sigh. I listened to slow mopey music all the way down to Portland, peering through the rain (need new windshield wipers!) and thinking about stuff. When I learned how to hypnotize several years ago my boss explained that a good comparison to explain to people how hypnosis is a form of very deep relaxation is that of driving down a lonely road at night, for hours and hours, just watching the yellow line. You snap to it all of a sudden and look at the odometer and wonder how you just drove a hundred miles with essentially no recollection whatsoever. I kind of needed that time and space to zone out on Friday, in the car in the rain, letting all sorts of strange and wondrous and sometimes daunting thoughts percolate a little bit.
At the end of my traffic-interrupted reverie I managed to navigate the treacherous Powell’s parking lot…worse, perhaps, than the University District Trader Joe’s parking lot…and to find the bathroom and find the books I wanted to get for Anna and to find the book I wanted for myself, and even eventually to find Peter and Tracy, who were all happy faces and big baskets weighed down with books. We went to sushi with much good cheer and met up with a bunch of their friends, most of whom I’d not met before but all of whom I liked very much.
I guess that’s how you know you have good friends, right, when you can see them in a variety of situations and at different times and with different people and it’s always fun, they’re always who they are, you always sort of recognize them. I fully believe that not only is context everything but that most people are comprised of many many different aspects or parts of themselves. With some people you always know what facet they’ll be on any given day, and of course with some people, you never can tell. I’m starting to think, though, that a mark of good friendship is to be able to recognize a lot of those various aspects in the people you care about and enjoy them whether you’re at a black tie event or in your cube at work or out seeing bellydance or whatever. People are variable in familiar ways.
This is the reason I am giving for having enjoyed sushi with three people I did know and six I didn’t…I feel like I know Peter and Tracy well enough by now to trust that they wouldn’t make me eat raw fish with mean nasty people but instead would allow me to eat raw fish with lovely funny gorgeous people, which was exactly the case. I sat next to Paul, one of my campmates from good old Burning Man 2003, and we talked about what we’d been up to since the last time we saw each other. I demonstrated my effortless ability to give a long answer to a short question when he was asking what I was doing for money and to keep me off the streets. Did I just smile and nod and say “I’m doing psychology research with folks who have MS. I get paid to talk on the phone.” No, sorry. No. I gave a ten minute monologue about change stage theory, the effectiveness of motivational interviewing as an intervention to modify behavior, and some of the less commonly known aspects of multiple sclerosis. Much to everyone’s credit people overlooked the fact that I was a) hogging the conversation and b) doing so with part of a spider crab leg caught between my teeth, because everyone was lovely and we talked about bellydance and the internet and real estate and books places we’d been and places we’d like to go until it was time to heave ourselves up from the table and stagger back to the Toyota for a nice relaxing three-hour trip back to the 206 in the POURING DOWN RAIN. Peter drove. It was great. He reports that my alignment is out of whack and that, hoo boy, I could really use some new windshield wipers, dude.
Now, Friday was fun and all, but I was extra especially excited for Saturday because Saturday was spa day, and you know how much I love the spa. This was extra super great because of course there is a new spa location, way closer to Seattle than the original spa, and I was thrilled not to have to drive too much. After a gigantic bag of delicious treats and waving farewell to our male friends, Tracy, Treasa and I hopped in the car and were getting naked in the very cushy and nice locker room not forty minutes later.
Oh, the spa. How I love the spa. I have decided that I want to one day get a full package at the spa: massages, facial, terrifyingly thorough body scrub, manicure, pedicure, bibimbop at the spa café, everything. I love the whirlpools. I love the hot rooms. I loooooooove the mugwort. I love the funny pink shower caps. I love the freezing cold waterfall in the cool pool. I love the naked ladies. I love the bamboo floors. I love the spa and it’s kind of a bad thing that it’s only twenty minutes away now, this new location…which, hilariously, is in a strip mall next to a Long’s Drugs up in Lynnwood. It’s super sketch outside and super cush inside, which I guess is better than the reverse. But oh so relaxing, and oh so calm and peaceful. Oh so interesting to see so many womens’ bodies and to understand what true variety there really is, something that you can forget when you watch TV and see movies and read awful glossy magazines. Oh so annoying to wait forty minutes to be served some barley tea at the café, but oh so heavenly to (finally) stick your entire head into a vat of gorgeously steamy noodle soup. Oh so luxurious to sit with friends and talk aimlessly about people you know and people you sort of know and people that you used to know and don’t anymore, your little stripey robes that they give you falling open a little but whatever, because you’re barefoot anyway wearing a pink cotton shower cap and who the hell cares, anyway. The spa. I just love the spa. There are many reasons that I think it sort of sucks to be a guy sometimes, but surely on the top ten list is the fact that guys don’t ever get to go to the spa.
After four or so hours of blissful smiles and repeated mugwort dunkings, we reluctantly got back into our clothes and back into the car, where we picked up Peter from some sort of juggling festival he’d been at and turned a couple of dorky dreadlocked heads when we walked in, three bemused and very clean and relaxed girls. “We’re here for our boyfriend,” I announced to the ticket taker, and they let us in with no fuss. It was, of course, POURING DOWN RAIN but that was okay because we had no plans to go anywhere but the kitchen to make pizza.
Tracy made the pizza dough…I’d been intending to watch her do it so I could learn but she was so quick, even when I mistakenly dumped the proofing yeast down the drain, grumbling about how some people never clean up after themselves and leave their dirty dishes all over the place. Ooh, awkward. But Tracy persevered and I stayed out of trouble by prepping some of the toppings and playing a little Dance Dance Revolution while we waited for the dough to rise and soon it was time to invent the most delicious pizzas the world has ever seen and to snarf them down with no delay. My favorite was fig compote, caramelized onion with this crazy smoked blue cheese that Tracy suggested that almost killed me with its awesome intensity. Pesto and goat cheese was also fantastic, as was kalamata olive and feta, as was mushroom and pepper with mozzarella, as was three-cheese with tomatoes, as was everything.
Making pizza is the ideal dinner party activity, if your dinner party guests are serious about delicious treats and also the type that like to get their hands dirty and help with the dishes afterwards. Everyone gets to have exactly what she or he wants and there’s plenty to share and it’s so much fun that when you take your first pizza out of the toaster oven (the superlative fig, onion, and insane smoked blue cheese) and you watch helplessly when it skitters out of your hands (next time use an oven mitt, you idiot) and face-down onto the counter, you will bravely scrape the toppings up and smack them right back down on the shell, rationalizing that you cleaned the counter pretty recently and everything’s really hot, right, so it’s okay germ-wise. Your friends will cheer your resourcefulness and then it will be time for the homemade cherry-upside down cake and the homemade vegan fudge with dried cranberries, oh Lord have mercy. You will know that your dinner party was a great success if you are completely covered with olive oil and pesto and chocolate and if you continue to sneak little pieces of cake and fudge after everyone has decamped to the TV room to get ready to watch Labyrinth and fall asleep on the carpet in a puddle of fig-scented drool.
Sunday morning the members of my household were paid a handsome compliment by Peter, who mentioned he felt so comfortable in our house that when he heard breakfast was ready he just hopped up and was halfway to the kitchen before he looked down and realized, nope, no pants. We assured him that ours is a pants-optional kind of a place and then it was time to sit around the kitchen table and sip tea and talk about stuff some more. And then it was time to go to the market for pluots and apples and pumpkin-spice cupcakes for the train ride down to Eugene, and then it was time to race the clock and to curse the goddamn football traffic, like WHO CARES ABOUT FOOTBALL, and to throw Peter and Tracy out of the car door as the train pulled up to the tracks, and then it was time to come home and take a nap and wish that all my friends lived with me all the time even as I was savoring some quality time alone in the cloud room. Today Peter emailed me a list of all the conversations we had over the weekend so we can continue discussing them at our leisure.
I’m so lucky. I do a lot of things really wrong and I mess up my life all the time, but I do one thing right, most of the time: I have really good friends. It only takes a couple of days to be lavishly reminded of that.