Today's "Reassuring Friend When I Needed It" award goes to Brad for saying something really really simple to me last night that made me feel like, well, not quite the dork I usually feel like…

I explained to Brad last night about how I've got to transplant my thyme seedlings over the weekend. Why now? If I can get them started now, I can have them (hopefully) of decent size by springtime, so that I can put them in the ground. Some of my friends have made some pretty snide commentary about all this [and related things] which a) kinda hurt and b) made me wonder if I'm being twitchy and overplanning like I sometimes do.I'll spare you the details of the conversation, but basically I came out not feeling like an idiot, which is rather nice. Either way, I'll still get them all transplanted (I bought window boxes and planting medium yesterday) and hopefully they'll flourish indoors if I put them under a grow light of some kind…

I've been kinda reconsidering the whole friend thing lately, because of something that happened recently. Earlier this week I found out that a friend had lied to me; that hurt tremendously. Perhaps this isn't as big of a deal to most people as it is to me. Being the painfully shy introvert I still am at heart, I don't keep a wide circle of friends.

This is, mostly, because I don't have the emotional reserves to treat very many people with the degree of respect and attention that I think friends should have. (I make a strong delineation between 'acquaintance' and 'friend.') With rare exceptions, it takes a lot of effort to move from being an acquaintance of mine to a friend of mine. The process virtually guarantees that someone who becomes a friend (not an acquaintance) is someone that I can trust implicitly.

I would rather have two people whose advice and friendship I trust absolutely than have twenty people who "know OF me."

My preference for depth over breadth generally protects me from the buffetings caused by fair-weather friends. The problem is that when something like this happens, it troubles me more than most people—it calls my judgment of people into question.

I try not to ask a lot of my friends; I really hate being a bother, and I try to minimize the amount of time that I am one. The one thing that I expect, though, is honesty. If I'm told something that I don't like or that makes me uncomfortable or angry—well, yes, I'm human, but I'll get over it, like most adults. In the end I'll come back to that person when I need advice, because I know that they're willing to speak the truth to me, even when it's unpleasant.

But I just don't understand why this person would lie to me. (I'm specifically avoiding stating this person's gender, but as far as I know, this person doesn't read my commentary here on domesticat.)

Then again, this is a person who has made it clear to me that they're not very comfortable with the person I am now. This person remembers me as I was while I was in college—a little wilder, a little more carefree, but a lot less financially stable.

Things always get painful when money's involved, I guess. I remember what it was like to have $15 to buy a week's worth of food, and that kind of thing sticks with you, no matter what comes after. Every time I go to the grocery store and come back with armfuls of bags to stock the pantry with, you'd better believe that there's a little voice inside of me that reminds me of how things once were.

If this friend can't look past the trappings of my life to see that it's the same person living it as before… then maybe my time and my energy are better spent on other people.

C'est la vie.

In other news, my parents are arriving today. They'll be here for the weekend. I don't know if I'll do much updating while they're here, so this page might be up for a few days. As we all know, real life sometimes interferes with what we really want to do in life.

Have a good weekend.