New Year's resolutions

When I first got back to Palo Alto, I was bored so witless that I started a blog. And since that didn't fill all the empty hours between masturbation and eating, I started reading all the old letters I'd saved. They dated back to 1989 (a Whitmanesque poem entitled "Blue is for Blueberry" by one Ruth W.) and continued uninterrupted to the present (from proto-lesbian platonic love letters to/from my friends in the pre-Laurel Holloman stage of my life, to a letter written on Vermont white birchbark from Laura).

All this epistolary crap made me pine for all the love that I used to have in my life. I'm nostalgic like that. In particular, I reread a postcard from an ex-girlfriend, sent in March 1997, two months after the subitaneous decline in our heart-stopping first love. She wrote, "I still love you, and I value and respect your friendship."

I got all teary, wrote emails to people I used to know demanding we meet again, and then made abstract and sprawling New Year's resolutions to: 1) be a better person, 2) keep in better touch, 3) live more in the moment and quit pining about the past, 4) pine more about the past, 5) be more patient, and 6) be less monstrously bitchy.

Then I met up with this ex-girlfriend, and it was pleasant but abundantly clear that we had grown up into different lives. She worked at Yahoo! and wore flesh-colored shoes that came to a point three inches past the end of her toes. I am paid in peanuts by a queer non-profit and I recently thought I had been gifted with scabies and lice in the same week. We got along, and I was happy to re-see someone I liked, but 1997 it was not.

A week later, I met up with the ex-girlfriend of this ex-girlfriend, who once threatened to become my girlfriend. I hadn't seen her in almost four years, and was expecting another dull ride on the unmoored nostalgia boat. I was surprised! I expected rusted parts, but found working machinery! No pointy shoes! We see-sawed on a piece of driftwood near the Golden Gate bridge and had a lovely talk! A peach!

She later wrote to say that I didn't have the wherewithall to articulate:

I'm finding it rarer and rarer in my old age to revisit people from the dregs of history and not feel like it's some sort of scripted gesture of goodwill and misguided faith in continuity. Which is to say that seeing you was just the same as seeing a real friend, or even the same as meeting someone new and being delighted at connection you don't necessarily have with everyone, and not just an attempt to hold on to former pieces of myself.

So I rewrote my New Year's resolutions. I'm going to stop reading old letters and twisting my head into nostalgia braids. Finding real connections with old friends is great, but pining for 1988 has serious shortcomings.

Another friend recently told me that her resolution is to stop eating when she feels full. Awesome!