Make any New Friends

Make any new friends?

(this news item posted on September.09.2005)

Yeah, so this still isn't the Opus Photojournal entry yet. I'm still running frantically trying to catch up to my life. Soon.

Yesterday...

"Did you meet any new friends today?" asked my relatively new friend Alyssa in an IM yesterday. Prompted I'm sure by my last journal entry. I hadn't. I tried to explain about the law of averages. I tried to explain about how the day had been talking to my old friends (because, y'know, what kind of friend would I be if I wasn't interested in talking to you just because I already know ya?). I really don't think I made any new friends the day before yesterday either.

That was then...

Okay. So. Today started off working a new job. I immediately made a new coworker friend. Troy. And he told me all kinds of useful things about how to do my job. And stuff about what music is good to listen to. And then he told me a whole lot of stuff about his car that maybe I wasn't all that interested in. Point is, he's a cool guy. Glad to know him.

Okay, and then just now. Anna Walsh and I went to a place called CEM where a senior citizen poetry group was holding an open reading and I made SIXTEEN new elder friends!

That is FAN-FRICKIN-TASTIC!

And we shared poetry, and my new friend Nancy talked to me about compulsive cleaning and the loss of a parent and art and surrogate mothers from the community and how great Anna Walsh is and living in a place that becomes your family and everything.

Happy.

-Alex

Writing: Relations 2 - Chapter 4. 90%
Cool: Tossing around 90 lb tires.
Fastest truckload so far: N/A
Newest friend: Nancy
Priorities: Forms for new job, Resource book, Opus photo journal, catch up on snail mail, writing my favorite book ever.

Stat!

Stat!

(this news item posted on September.03.2005)

Getting things back:
tuesday: driver's license - expired 9 months ago
wednesday: highs and lows - been wandering too long
thursday: employment - quit my job to go wandering, now I have a good shot at better one
friday: hot water - had been 5 months without hot water (whatever)
saturday: see below

Meeting New Friends
wednesday: Jaquelin - new hot chocolate friend
thursday: Marcia & two ladies who's names I don't recall - new food co-op friends
friday: David - new basketball friend; John & Jae: New friends at the Soap Making House
saturday: Lana & Jolene: see below

Unfortunate Computations:
Okay, so assuming:
I continue to make 2.25 friends per day
Buffalo's population (currently around 290,000) continues to decline about 2,000 per year
I have around 1200 friends here presently
It would take me about 102 years to make friends with everyone in Buffalo
No wonder I always feel like I don't have enough time and feel rushed.
Of course this is an unscientific computation, because, well, as people
came to be friends with me they would be less inclined to leave.
Not actually. There's been no real evidence of that. Quite the contrary.
But. IF I WERE ABLE TO FREEZE MYSELF FOR 140 YEARS THEN... THEN it would only take 10 years to get to know the 10,000 or so remaining people.
But then my 1200 current friends would probably all be dead.
Man, I'll just never get to be friends with everyone in Buffalo unless I REALLY step it up.

welcome to below:
So I'm going to try to let go of all the people I can't be friends with and focus on some of the people I do get to be friends with. It really seems like Buffalo has been making a conscious effort to provide me with the things that I had at Opus that made me happy. It can't always provide me with the exact same quality of Opus' version, but it's been at least trying to give me a little something in every category.

For a while I thought I was imagining this, but it's really true. One thing that I was really missing about Opus was the ability to have a Polyamorous Identity Group and get together with other Poly people and talk about Polyamory and get to feel like I had some friends that could relate to me. And so, totally from out of the blue, someone on a POly website sent me an online message and told me to check the WNYPoly yahoo group and so I did and they were having a meetup. And we met up today and now I have two new Poly friends. Here in Buffalo. That's AMAZING!

So there can be no denying for me anymore that Buffalo's trying to give me everything I need to survive here. Today was a really good day to be here.

and finally for some stuff about water
So I wasn't really going to go to Summer Services at the UU church of Buffalo this year. But I wanted Birdie to get to see one so we went last week and saw one and it was cool.

I talked to the lady from the Social Justice Committee at UUCBuff for a minute and she asked me to come to church the following week (tomorrow) and wear blue and read a fact about water. This will be in advance of the Water Communion the following week (which I'll have to miss because I hope to be hanging out with Drew at the STLD Con).

So anyway, I was not thinking much of this whole reading a fact about water thing. Didn't seem to really fit in the grand scheme of things at the time. Then last night I went to dinner at the Soap Making house as I'm inclined to do some Friday nights. And Peter was there, as he often is on some Friday nights. And we talked a little but nothing much.

And THEN I ran into him again today at the food co-op and he looked upset. And so I stopped him and had him talk to me and he was TOTALLY PISSED OFF because the food co-op is still selling assloads of Evil Poland Springs water from the vile Nestle Corporation and they are not offering any alternatives even after as many letters as he's written and as many times as they've promissed they'll look into alternatives.

SO NOW IT ALL MADE SENSE. This whole thing is about how I'm supposed to take some time tonight and put in some more research about Nestle and Poland Springs so that the facts I deliver tomorrow at the UUCofBuff will have some really important things to say about water. And I will bring a lot of petitions with me so that we can get signatures and present a stack of them to the food co-op so that we can finally get some action on having those evil ass Nestle fuckers all over our co-op which SUPPOSEDLY aspires to embrace products that promote a friendly coexistence with the other citizens of the world. Yeah. So I need to go do that now.

Poland Springs = Perrier = Deer Park = San Pelligrino = Nestle = Evil ass exploiters of poor women everywhere = getting their asses sued by the state of Michigan for lowering the water tables = Nestle Suxs

My Writing... Is Like a Party.

My writing...is like a party.

(this news item posted on September.02.2005)

Bounceback Day:
Today (Thursday) was a bounceback day. Wednesday was not so hot; dreary and kinda sad. But today came roaring back.

I think that Jesse and I BOTH got really good jobs today. Yep, from 0 to 100% employment in one day for the Art Co-op. Time to start turning the ol place around.

Old friends, new friends, gold friends, blue friends:
It was nice to be back at the food co-op working some member hours. I'm running for the board again and I started my quiet campaign to any friends I ran into (and there were many). The food co-op is so cool. It's like "the Big Room" where you just go there and wait for your friends to show up, and are quite often surprised by which ones they are.

On Sunday there is a huge annual labor day activist gathering. And my friends Kevin and Emily are back in town for it and they breezed through the co-op today. Man, how I had missed them. And then I made at least two new friends working at the co-op today. People that I can't wait to talk to again.

Rawk!

Breakdance!:
At the co-op they play XM radio. Mildly pleasant. They were playing an 80s station. That song from the Breakin movie came on "Ain't no stoppin us... no one does it better" So I started breakdancing in the stock room. Maybe it's just the year that I was born, but I fail to see how people can refrain from breakdancing when this song comes on. To me it's automatic. I went out into the store to check to see if people were breakdancing. They weren't. I sang the song and did some breakdancing and nobody even looked my way. Like the Bee girl in the video except there was no field of bee people at the end. I need to get a copy of that song somehow.

Writing a really good book:
And the writing streak continues. In the last few years I wrote a book about my life. It's a great book and a book I still get excited about. But there's something about my novels, Relations, that's just even more exciting. If you read carefully and pay attention, these two books taken together, reveal much more about me than the book that I intentionally wrote to reveal everything about me. I am on book two of this two book series and today I tore into chapter four of this ten chapter book. I've written a bit less than half the chapter. It just keeps on taking me higher.

During my six months off from writing I wrote a very detailed outline for this book. I had imagined that I knew exactly how it was going to go.

WRONG!

I keep finding out more and more about the future every day, and the people in it are full of surprises. It's quite exciting. I can't seem to get my characters to sit still. They're all about to lose control and I think I like it.

Have you read the first book yet?
http://www.amprosoft.com/books/Relations