HoLa

This has been a summer of reunions. Reunions with friends, relatives, people I worked with, most of them physically absent from my life for at least six months. When I imagine these reunions I imagine fireworks and music, wide smiles and double-takes. For the most part, the reentrance of these important people into my life has been very anticlimactic. Like we saw each other yesterday. No readjustment period or awkwardness like with long-lost cousins, just the mandatory "How was Spain?" before starting to make new memories.

My first reunion was with my family at the international terminal of the LAX airport. I was two hours late strolling into the terminal and I had to use a pay phone to locate my family, who had long before moved to the seats to wait with their "Welcome Home" posters and balloons. After my hellish journey home and my delusion from lack of sleep and food, that was my only reunion that wasn't anticlimactic -- it was in fact wonderful because my sisters looked older and taller and no one asked me how Spain was.

Yesterday I ran into two people I haven't seen in over a year. One was outside the grocery store, and we exhanged plesantries while I grinned crazily and marvelled in my head at the changes in both our lives. One passed me on the street and gave me a little wave and a "Hey" like we had kept in touch all along, even though we hadn't. When I caught up with my former roommie in Barcelona in April after nine months, she was sitting on a bench on the corner outside our hostel looking and acting astonishingly the same (and not pregnant). We spent the following five days ripping through the sights in Barcelona, dancing, and talking like "old friends," which I guess we are by now. A good friend showed up on my doorstep in the middle of the night my first day back to Santa Barbara and proceeded to pass out on our couch. Another one was sleeping on the couch when I stumbled home late and when I was getting ready for work the next morning; she asked me "Hi, how are you?" as I ate my breakfast.

Now a senior in college, I suppose my peers and I are now well-versed in the art of saying hellos and goodbyes. If I see someone I haven't seen since Greek Myth lecture freshman year, high school, or even elementary school, I smile, say hello and make small talk. Or shake my hair in front of my face, hold my sunglasses and hide. There are still a few important people I haven't yet seen, at least one of which deserves fireworks and music but will probably recieve just a long hug and the biggest smile I can muster. Goodbyes back in December struck me as slightly silly, because there were just as many hellos waiting somewhere down the road. Hellos, unlike goodbyes, are long-awaited but not immediately fulfilled. The first hello may be anticlimactic, but the second and third and forth are that much sweeter, because even though not much changes, six months or more is really a long time to go without seeing someone who remains still a friend.

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poker face

Someone on the bus today was playing one of those video poker games with the beeping for the whole twenty minutes it took to get downtown. Whenever I turned around it wasn't readily apparent who it was, so it just kept going and going and going until I thought I would be forced to jump out the window in order to get away from it.

Maybe it was the free McDonald's gourmet coffee this morning, but my attention span is five minutes long this morning and i'm thinking it's the unprovoked agitation I was subjected to on the bus.