as an aside, while chatting with A just the other day, she had lamented about how she had been spending a lot of time with a particular ex-boyfriend from high school lately who is apparently a huge asshole. i flatly refused to offer any sympathy, suggesting that if she chose to spend time with people that made her unhappy, she could blame only herself. In response, she intimated that i couldn't understand because i had lots of old friends whereas she had made a pretty clean break from her past. All of her friends that she genuinely likes she has met within the past four years, whereas this ex-boyfriend had been a part of her life for eight or nine years now. the simple value of having known someone for that long apparently outweighed in her mind the fact that she completely disliked him as a person.

it is true, i do have rather a lot of old friends. or particularly, i am still on close terms with more than a few friends from high school. ND, for example, who lives just down the hall at the shawshack has a shared history with myself going back a good eleven years now. not to mention the obvious weight of a healthy eight year relationship with misslake and the fact that i am on quite good terms with most of my family.

but $childhood_friend is a special case. there are a lot of people that i have known for ten years. but, ten years ago, i was still basically me. if you push that line back just three more years, there is only one non-familial link remaining to my past: $childhood_friend. in fact, he and i have been friends for 21 years now.

initially, we were friends simply because of proximity. growing up in the country as i did, you can't be picky. and somehow, as we grew older and became people, though we ceased to spend much time together we always remained close. The thing that amazes me about my relationship with $childhood_friend is just how little our friendship these days seems to use our massive shared experience as a crutch. with other old friends, one i have known for far less time, it is not uncommon for the conversation to dwell primarily on catching up and reminiscing. but with $childhood_friend everything always seems fresh. even if we haven't seen each other for a year or more, we can pour a couple of drinks, sit back and it is immediately as though we've been right there with each other all along.

oops, that was a long sidetrack.... the meat of this diary (which is going to likely be quite short as my belly is rumbling; perhaps "bacon bits of this diary" would be more appropriate) is that, saturday aft and evening, while sitting around drinking vodka martinis and hanging out at $childhood_friend's new house (which is right out in the country not far from where we grew up) several other old faces from our childhood stopped in to say hello. and they brought their babies in tow.

just in the last year a switch has flipped in me where it stopped weirding me out when people my age had kids. and after a weekend of playing with the adorable human larvae of my childhood peers, the urge to reproduce is strong. it is a strange thing to look objectively at all my old reasons for not wanting children and to see that they are absolutely as valid as ever but that they simply can not stand up against the biological imperative.

ah well, not quite yet.

incidentally, when i mentioned this to E last night she said that she thought that my genetic material was not entirely maladaptive. how sweet is that?

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okay, time for pizza and footie.