Friendship! Is there anything more beautiful?

Last weekend, just as I was sitting down to work for the evening, two of my favorite people in the world called me, one almost right after the other. And although both times I picked up the phone and almost inwardly groaned, thinking “I want so much to talk to my friend, but I have so much work to do that I don’t even know if I’ll enjoy this conversation,” I nevertheless picked up the phone both times, compelled by some internal pressure to not subvert my priorities, to not let these mountains of work all around me to turn me into the sort of person who doesn’t savor friendship or continually reinforce the tender ties that link me to the most important people of my past (and my present! But only if I’m careful and attentive…)

And then, both conversations turned out to be so gratifying, so warm, so reinforcing, that I wondered how it was that I ever even considered not answering the phone. But as much as I enjoyed talking to two of my dearest friends about everything that was going on in our lives, however briefly, I could still feel the weight of a semester of rare correspondence. I still recognized that there was so much going on in my life that they didn’t know about, and that I couldn’t possibly fill them in on in a half-hour conversation.

But it also made me return to the idea of this blog as an incredibly powerful form of communication. I, for one, LOVE reading people’s blogs (heck, even the blogs of people who are semi-strangers, blogs that I stumble upon through facebook browsing or following blogger profiles through comments) and find so much value in being able to keep up with a person’s life through a few clicks of my laptop mouse, so that I still feel connected to their lives, even when we haven’t had the chance to talk in a while.

So, I’ve decided to rededicate this blog with a new mission of reinforcing and stimulating friendship. I’m going to start writing about the sort of things I would talk to my closest friends about if we could have a weekly lunch date in Bowles Plaza or the ASMS cafeteria or the Jacobs Camp dining hall or on the grass of the Library Mall. And I’m going to actually tell people about this blog, so that they (hopefully) will leave me comments and hold me accountable for actually updating this blog. Here's to the mission.

Won't you all help me out?