Yesterday was the first day of lower body workout, which included about a million ab crunches. Now I pretty much hurt all over, and I stepped on the scale to discover that I’ve gained two pounds since Monday. My weight fluctuates by about five pounds normally so this is not unprecedented, but hardly bodes well for the start of the 12-week program.

Just to ensure that I don’t lose any weight at all in the next week, my birthday is on Saturday. Tomorrow afternoon, I’m sailing with my friend Ingrid and staying out at her yacht club for a BBQ, after which she’s promised me s’mores for a pre-birthday dessert. Then on Saturday, Pat and my sister Betty are taking me to Banu, an Iranian Kebob Vodka Bar (really!), for lunch; and Damir is taking me somewhere for dinner, the exact location of which is still shrouded in mystery (or not yet selected).

Personally, I would never give fashion advice to a drag queen, considering that most of the ones that I’ve met have a much better (or at least wildly different) fashion sense than I do. I was at my friend Pat’s last night and she was showing me the retro/trendy/tacky shoes that she just bought: a kitten-heel slide with a rhinestone-encrusted dragonfly on the front — perfect for her. When I commented favourably on them, she remarked that she had been called on to offer advice on what shoes a colleague of hers could wear with his divine gown when he went to gay camp this weekend, and she suggested some silk flowers on his thong sandals. With ideas like that, I figure she could make a good side business in drag queen fashion tips.

I draw inspiration from my friends for all sorts of reasons. Pat, my longest-term friend, does the most amazing photography. Michelle is starting, at age 40, to train in an inter-faith ministry. Barbara makes TV programs. And Susan, after living with rheumatoid arthritis for over 25 years, runs marathons (feel free to make a donation to her next run in Amsterdam at the link).

Not sure why all my inspirational friends are women…

I’ve stopped worrying about why Damir does some things, and just accepted the fact that he’s way more introverted than me, and comes from a much different culture. Today, for example, I have a (male) friend visiting from out of town, and we’re meeting for dinner. I said to Damir, “Hey, I’m going to meet my friend for Indian at 6, come and join us, you’ll really like him.” He declined, saying that he’s busy working. I think that it’s more complex than that, and imagined any combination of the following reasons:

• He’s totally stressed about finishing this project and wants to just focus on that.
• He thinks that he’d be bored listening to my friend and I reminice and look at pictures of my friend’s kid.
• He’s trying to be polite by letting my friend and I have some time alone to catch up.
• He doesn’t want to eat Indian food since it gave him the runs once.
• Since he’s working on his laptop at my place, rather than his own place, he’s just waiting for me to leave so that he can raid the cupboards for my stash of almonds and fine Shiraz, and watch reruns of CSI on SpikeTV.
• It’s raining and he doesn’t want to get wet.
• He’s being excessively introverted today and doesn’t want to meet anyone new.

I’m betting that I’ll come home to find him in front of the TV with a glass of wine and an empty almond container.

Yesterday, I was going to post something that mentioned my ex (specifically, how good it was to be able to put something back in the fridge after using part of it without him obsessively repacking it into a smaller container), then stopped myself because I didn’t want to appear that I am still thinking about him six years after I left him. However, I’ve heard that it takes as long to get over a relationship as you were originally in the relationship, so I should just get over the fact that he’s still going to come to mind for another seven years.

I have a long-distance relationship: 9.2km, according to Yahoo! maps. That may not seem like a great distance, but it keeps us apart during the week, primarily by our choice. We both work more than half the time from our respective homes so have some amount of flexibility, but neither of us can easily pick up our work and move it to the other’s place just so that we can spend a day working in close proximity. At night, Damir has martial arts classes two nights each week, and I have an active social life of wine tastings, theatre, and other things that he doesn’t really enjoy. Usually, he comes to my place on Friday afternoon and stays until Monday morning.

We’re both loners of sorts. I’ve lived alone for over five years now, as well as several years before I was married. He’s lived alone for the 11 years that he’s lived in Canada, and as I just found out, he lived with a woman once for three weeks before he came here — not sure if that’s a big red flag or something to laugh about! We may have the perfect long-distance relationship, something that I never thought that I could do: we Skype during the week and see each other every weekend, but get to spend evenings alone or with other friends.

Last week, we meandered around the subject of living together, and seem to have made some progress on that, since we both were in favour of it at the same time (something that has never happened before). Could be time for a change.

Although I’m mildly introverted, Damir is really introverted: if he were to take a Myers-Briggs test, he’d be about as far towards “Introversion” as you can get on the Extraversion-Introversion scale. However, he’s very funny and very intelligent, so when he does open his mouth, there’s a greater chance of something interesting coming out. We spend a lot of hours in comfortable silence, reading or watching TV or just hanging out at the local pub. To feed my inner extrovert (if that’s not an oxymoron), I also spend time with other friends who are a bit more vocal.

I used to be married to an extremely extroverted guy, the type whose middle name is “personality”. Unfortunately, his first name is “borderline” and his last name is “disorder”.

Life is much better now.

All this reconnecting lately, I hooked up with someone who I went to university with over 20 years ago — that’s enough to make me feel old! When I last talked to him, his kids were about 2 and 3 years old, and they’re now 9 and 10. I’ve met his wife a few times, but she didn’t leave much of an impression; I always have to look up her name in my PDA before I talk to him. I recall one night when they were over for a dinner party with a group of other people, and one of my ex’s (odd) friends had brought his rather large parrot and let it fly around during the party. My friend’s wife was terrified of the parrot, wouldn’t eat the food that we had prepared because she only like plain cooking, and wanted to go home to the suburbs early. I don’t think that I saw her again after that, although I did see my friend occasionally for lunch or drinks after work downtown.

We had a chat on the phone to get caught up, and as it turns out, he’s out of work (seems to be an epidemic amongst my IT friends) so we talked about contracting and looking for work. He mentioned that he spends as much time looking for work as he ever did working — a very similar comment to one that I heard from another out-of-work IT professional friend a few days ago — but that when his wife came home the other day and found him working on fixing something around the house, she asked him why he wasn’t looking for work. Naturally, to be polite, I asked where she was working these days. “Oh, she never went back to work after the kids were born,” he said. I paused probably a bit longer than I should have (I don’t want to appear judgemental, even when I am), and he hastily added “but she does volunteer work.” I confess, I did judge them, and I feel bad about it. Even as I write this, I’m torn between wanting to rant about a woman in her early 40’s who chooses to not work even when her kids have been in school full-time for at least 5 years and her husband has been out of work for at least 8 months, and admiring them for making choices that they presumably feel is of benefit to their family. My inner feminist rebels, however, and she just won’t shut up.

I know that this is a feminist backlash effect, because I know another couple where the man stays home, looks after the house, and writes (although, after five years, he has yet to publish anything). They don’t have kids, but he’s every bit as much a househusband as my friend’s wife is a housewife. Yet somehow, I feel that the househusband arrangement is okay, even a bit amusing, whereas the housewife arrangement is retro, and not in a good way.

It’s always a shock when my well-hidden prejudices jump out and bite me on the ass.

I just watched an episode of Naked Josh on Showcase. This is a great show, very clever writing and some interesting dissection of our sexuality through the artistic vehicle of the sexual anthropology course that Josh teaches. There’s always some tidbit of truth tucked in there somewhere.

This episode dealt with flirting, but the thing that struck me was the closing scene. Josh and Hunter, after a misinterpreted flirtation, settle into a friendly brunch at their “favourite place”, having coffee and playfully trading sections of the newspaper. There’s still a sexual tension between them, but at this point, they’re just enjoying each other’s company as friends. I watched the scene, and realized that I miss male friends.

I’ve had two really close male friends in my life. The first, I met in university, even shared an apartment, and was very close with him for a number of years. Right up until he had an affair with my husband. Stupidly, at the time, I blamed my friend and forgave my husband; I haven’t spoke with my (ex-) friend since then. In retrospect, I should have ditched them both, since I put up with another several years of my husband’s bullshit before I walked. My friend’s excuse at the time: we’d “grown apart”, as if that was a good reason to hop in the sack with my other half.

The other, still current, male friend has been amazing for me over the years. He helped me survive my divorce, my move to California and back to Toronto. We hung out together, just hung out enjoying each other’s company like the scene in Naked Josh. He comforted me when I called him in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. I helped him pick furniture for his new house. For a time, we worked for the same company, and I still do some work for them so we always have work stuff to talk about.

Then, relationships happened. Funnily enough, my friend introduced me to my boyfriend, although never thinking that we would get together. Obviously, I started spending quite a bit of time with the boyfriend, but I don’t do that to the exclusion of all others, so I still make time for my circle of friends. I do have less time for my friend, and we also feel a bit weird about discussing anything to do with my relationship, since the boyfriend is his friend, too. We still found time to do things together: dinner once in a while, or shopping (being a metrosexual, it’s his favourite activity). Then, I introduced my friend to his girlfriend, again, not imagining that they would get together. Now, it seems that most nights he’s at her place, and the ones when he’s not, the boyfriend’s at my place. The four of us do get together, but she’s just a casual acquaintance of mine, so it ends up with most of the conversation being between my friend and I.

I miss spending time with him, just the two of us. I miss being able to talk to him about relationships. I even miss shopping with him. Are male-female friendships destined to change when one or both of the parties gets into a relatioship? Are these friendships just a place-holder for relationships?