I helped a really close friend of mine go through her belongings in storage so that she could prepare to sell, give away, take back, or store elsewhere a room full of things accumulated over years and years of her life in San Francisco. You can imagine how emotional that might be. I learned from my mother to never throw anything useful away so not only do I have a lot of potentially useful stuff like boxes and paper and a million ribbons I’ll never use, but I also horde emotionally meaningful stuff.

I cleaned out the guest room the other day and happened to run into a card from an ex-boyfriend. It was so sweet and made me think fondly back to that person. I have no connection with him anymore. We didn’t stay in touch and we aren’t friends but for a few moments I felt affection for him again.

But it’s the past in the present — do I really need that? Do I really care to remember those times? What difference would it make if I never remembered them again?

The thing is that I have an awful memory so I probably won’t remember those times without the physical reminders — the ticket stubs, the journal entries, the cards I save in shoeboxes. I found a small photo of my son from when he was just a baby — a cutout of his head I must’ve meant to use for some craft or photo album. It was just the head, but I remember distinctly the photo it came from and it took me back to his babyhood. Nowadays I look at him and there’s no trace of that baby in him. He’s way too old and mature to spark that memory in me. But that’s what the photo albums are for.

I need to be a better purger of stuff. Because it’s not the things that you miss, it’s the memories that you associate with those things. And maybe you’re afraid without them those memories will disappear too — at least I am. But maybe if my memories only surface when I look at certain things, they’re not really worth recalling?

Personal blogs do still interest me. We had our annual second Thanksgiving and Kerry was telling us she updated her blog and I made a mental note to check it (and I did and I love that her 92 year old grandma has a new boyfriend. I checked Ineke’s blog too while I was at it, but I’d already seen the latest update). I’ve been reading like crazy lately. Blogs, news, RSS feeds of *all* kinds of shit. That last article I blogged about obsessed me so much, I blogged about it again.

Me and Ed at Do Re Mi singing our hearts out

So we finally had our karaoke night that we’ve been talking about for like a year. And it was way less painful than I expected. In fact, it was fun the entire time. I think Ed or someone just started singing as soon as we got into our room and we were off. Then we were fighting over microphones and songs…no, actually there wasn’t any fighting, but there was lots of singing with and without mics. My favorite was “Dick in a Box” by Ed and Isaac — I wish they would perform that at every get together of ours! Sadly, the photos didn’t come out that great. I wanted to post the cute one of me and Ineke singing “I Kissed a Girl” on either side of Ed while he’s taking a swig off a flask but it was a little blurry. Instead you can enjoy my tonsils. I don’t even know what we were singing, but boy am I into it.

Do Re Mi was an interesting venue. You rent a room with a karaoke machine in it. It’s Korean — you can tell by all the Korean text I can’t read. There’s no bouncing ball over the words to help you time your singing to songs you don’t know so well. It just lights up the word at the speed you’re supposed to go. And the next line is above the line you’re singing. I found that a little weird. One of my other favorite moments in the room: Jess tearing down a wall light in the karaoke room. It took two men to fix it.

We went back to The Bar on Mission afterwards. One of us girls said something about not liking her body (wasn’t me!). And one of our male friends, god bless his soul, said something to the effect of, oh dear, if you girls only knew that i’d lick rancid butter off of any of you. Which I interpretted to mean you’re crazy. you girls are all crazy about your bodies cause you’re all so hot i’d lick nasty rotten food off of any of your bodies just so i could put my tongue on you.

Then it was on to my house where we set off all my smoke detectors and filled my living room with smoke at about 2 in the morning. Isaac says “You’ve never used the fireplace?! You’re breaking my heart.” Mike says “Fire?” I say “I have duraflames!” Light fire. Mike examines the flue. No one’s really sure if it’s open or not. The fire going in the fireplace smells like…melting plastic. Jess goes “cough cough”. Smoke detectors activate so we disassemble them all. Minutes drag on…we end up kiling the fire with a fire extinguisher. Fun while it lasted. This morning my entire living room was covered in ash.

Every time someone I know gets married it kicks off marriage related topics in my little head. I was just thinking about how a year and a half ago there were four of us engaged women at Ed & Ineke’s wedding and none of us wanted to catch the bouquet. Clearly that speaks for itself. In the end, the bouquet got tossed twice and I only ended up with it out of pity for everyone involved in the whole affair — the poor scared girls that didn’t want to touch the thing (including me) and the poor bride who had to toss the thing twice.

So why didn’t any of us want the bouquet? One of us was just gun shy about marriage — she ended up happily married (just recently). One of us is unhappily married. Two of us quickly disentangled ourselves from our pending commitment errors — one of us at the very wedding where the unenthusiastic bouquet toss took place.

Every time I hang out with my friends lately, I find myself wondering how much of their relationship status affects mine. I’ll bet that if they were all single, I would probably be more inclined to stay so. Not to say that I’m in a relationship just because my friends are, but that their lives, given our closeness, can’t but affect me to some degree. I see their intimacy and happiness, and their flaws and strains, and my gut no longer recoils from it — the thought of spending forever with one person (or at least the foreseeable future) — in fact it seems potentially worth giving up my freedom for.

Two of our closest friends got married this weekend. It was a beautiful and touching ceremony — they had a close friend marry them, they had close friends read at the wedding, then of course, the traditional best man and father of the bride speeches. I guess none of that would be interesting if you didn’t know them, but since I do and know them well, I found it wonderful and sweet.

Another close friend lost someone close to her this weekend, too. I never know what to say to people when they’re going through something that raw. And I never really knew what to say to people who would say nice things to me when my mother’s death was still new. My heart breaks for her.

On the shuttle ride home while I was thinking about all this turmoil and change this past weekend, I couldn’t help but think how often the start of something is tied to the end of something else and warm memories blend in with heartbreak and maybe that’s a good thing. My mom died the day after my sister’s birthday so forever those two things are tied together. Our friend will remember her grandma’s passing on every one of our friends’ anniversaries. I think each year it gets easier to focus a little more on the birthday, but the death will always be there.

A close friend of mine recently said, Kitty Kat…it’s time you move into a bedroom now. Seriously. Yeah, yeah.

Every night this week I’ve run through the same ritual — come home from work, walk through the entire flat to make sure there are no murderers or thieves hiding in any of the rooms, get a drink and go to bed (not to sleep but to watch tv or work on my laptop until I pass out). This is my version of moping. I don’t want to see anyone or talk to anyone. I just want to be in my bed.

The other night this same friend (after I told him how I’d been spending my nights) said, Oh I get it — you’re in the living room because you’re pretending you still live in a studio apartment! You moved into a studio with “extra” closet space! Actually I moved into a two bedroom flat.

Every time I come up the stairs to my flat, I think ahead to how I have to walk through the entire place before I can get comfortable. But I realized that I must’ve done the same thing in my last place — it’s just that all I had to do then was to walk through the living room to the bathroom and I had seen the entire place. I’m not more anxious here; a two bedroom place just requires more walking through :)

Photos on flickr.com/sfkat:

We had a girls’ night out a couple of weeks ago and I got all dolled up — which for me is putting on a nice pair of slacks and an appropriately cute tank top and the most uncomfortable pair of shoes I own — I mean like I want to gouge someone’s eyes out after I’ve spent an hour in them and why didn’t I learn from the last time I wore them?! uncomfortable. At the end of the night, I wasn’t drunk, but apparently was stupid enough to try to climb on top of a fire hydrant in front of the Rite Spot in the Mission — per Ed or Ineke’s request, of course. That fire hydrant was about half my height.

In front of the Rite Spot in the Mission (photo by Ineke)

Don’t laugh at me, but in a week and a half we’re going to Vegas and having another girls’ night out to see…Justin Timberlake. You’d think I’d rather die than make that admission, but I’m doing it for the girls. I only know that Sexy Back song by him, but apparently women all over the world love that scrawny little playboy so what the hell.

So work provides these bicycles to ride around to the various campuses. They’re called Gbikes (because everything good starts with a G, baby). I rode over to take a break with a couple of friends yesterday and as I’m leaving one of them says, You’re a girl. In a skirt. On a bike. I love you! I rode away smiling and thinking ah, if only all men were so easy to please, then realized…oh, actually, I think they are. All the men I know are amazing and that easy to please. I’m the one that’s the difficult bitch :)