Weekend news

My short The Unbeaten Track is now available for sale at Amber Allure!

In non-writing news, yesterday I had breakfast in San Francisco with a college friend I haven't seen in twenty years. He's recently been making a driving tour of the country, reconnecting with people, and he's on the west coast for the final leg of his trip. We were both in the theater department and performed together, but I remember him most for being a director and assistant director. He cast me in his production of Les Belles Soeurs in what was one of my most challenging roles ever. It was also my last role in the area before life moved me on.

Anyway, we had recently reconnected on Facebook, and yesterday's breakfast was a two-hour extension of that. It's always weird how other people see your life. He paid me a great compliment in telling me how much better I looked now than I did in college, which I attribute to being happy. I wasn't back then. My early to mid twenties pretty much sucked. Theater and performing was my only place of joy then.

But the place I'm in now...it's not what I imagined the last time I saw him. I don't think anybody can predict where they'll be accurately. And I think we spend too much time trying to make things static and perfect when that's not what life is all about.

I'm reminded of a Faith Baldwin quote: Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations. Change will happen whether we want it to or not. That's the nature of life. Our happiness can hinge on our ability to embrace the change. If we resist, we have to be prepared to live with the consequences, but if we go with the flow--or even better, create the change ourselves (frankly, my husband is a master at this; when he wants something, he begins sculpting and influencing the world around him until he gets it)--we can release the fears and anxieties that might hold us back.

It's funny because I'm a very obsessive person who needs to be in control in a lot of different areas of my life. I make spreadsheets for everything, I'm obsessive about time management, and the list goes on. But I have had a ton of change in my adult life. Change I've sought, change I've welcomed. Until I moved to California, I had never managed to live at a single address as an adult for longer than 20 months at a time. In that fifteen-year period, I had twenty-one different places I called home. I changed continents twice within six years. I did so willingly and often eagerly. Now that my kids are in middle school, we don't do that anymore, but my husband and I have already started talking about what happens in seven years when both kids are out of high school, where we might want to live, what we might want to experience.

Yesterday, my college friend was telling me about the various times in his life, and he reached a period in his late twenties when he was making good money and had lost a lot of weight so he went a little crazy on the dating scene. He almost seemed apologetic when he told me, so I interrupted right then and said, "Good for you. You were young, you had the means, so why not have fun?"

This is the only ride we get. We might as well make the most of it.