You Can Pick Your Nose

We had brunch with friends, Krystal and Jonathan, at Blue Heron last Sunday. The photo isn’t great, but we had a fun time. Terrible service – the place is newly re-opened and the lone waitress was completely overwhelmed that people actually showed up. An hour after we ordered, food finally arrived, but my glass of Chardonnay never did. Fortunately the spot was lovely, the sun warm and the company excellent.

The next day, Krystal sent me a bottle of Chardonnay. Now that’s a friend.

I posted Tuesday about making choices. Never mind that not one of you commented. Blogger has been messed up for a couple of days, so I’m blaming that. Tip: don’t use Firefox. You can get in better with other browsers right now. But I can’t comment in any browser, so I figure that’s the deal.

Not that it’s making me crazy or anything.

At any rate, one of the things I mentioned is how we don’t get to choose our families and we often don’t really choose our friends. Our friends very often tend to be the people who are doing the same kind of thing that you are at the same time. So, in this case, Krystal is in David’s same class at Southwest Acupuncture College, fondly known as SWAC, which always makes me think of swatting flies. Jonathan is Krystal’s sweetie, so he and I roll our eyes at each other while David and Krystal complain to each other about classes.

Will we remain friends after graduation? Hard to say. Depends on where we all end up, what we’re doing.

One thing I’ve learned is that friendships come and go. People naturally come into our lives and leave again, like the changing seasons. And that’s okay – not everyone is meant to be a lifelong friend.

However, we can also carefully choose our friends. I learned this skill from one of my sorority sisters, Karen Koonce, now Weesner. She knew how to cultivate friendships. She picked out people in class who said interesting things and invited them to lunch. She paid attention to who knew stuff she wanted to learn and charmed them into letting her pick their brains.

This skill has served me well over the years, so that I have a life rich with interesting and supportive friends.

Thank you, Karen!

So Many Snobs, So Little Sense

Okay, so here’s the latest from the world of literary snobbery on the Kindle: only lovers of literature have them, not lowly genre readers.

This is a direct quote from Sara Nelson, author of “So Many Books, So Little Time.” (Which I have on my bookshelf and mostly read, until I got really bored.) She says: “It’s really expensive. If you’re going to pay that, you’re giving a statement to the world that you like to read — and you’re probably not using it to read a mass market paperback.”

Okay then.

Clearly Sara lives under a rock, or perhaps just under a stack of books. The first person I knew to own a Kindle, and that was the original Kindle, is my long time friend and sorority sister, Karen Weesner. Who gobbles up lots of books every week, many of them trashy mass market paperbacks. Once of the first things she told me she loved about it was that no one knew what she was reading. No slutty covers to elicit questions from the kids. No raised eyebrows from her husband, wondering why she was reading that one yet again.

Not everyone wants the world to know what they’re reading and not everyone who loves to read invests only in highbrow stuff.

Apparently Sara doesn’t know the latest statistics. Romance fiction sold $1.375 billion in estimated revenue for 2007 compared to $466 million for classic literary fiction. Umm…something makes me think these readers might have money to invest in a Kindle.

This makes me think of those articles where they ask famous people what they’re reading right now. Even as a pre-teen, I wondered when I saw one of those articles, how everyone could be reading “A Tale of Two Cities,” or “Les Miserables” in the original French. Where were the readers of Anne McCaffrey? As my life went on, I would scan these sorts of lists, hoping someone would fess up to the new Nora Roberts in her purse.

No one ever has.

Me? Right now I’m reading Veronica by Mary Gaitskill and Wicked Game by Jeri Smith-Ready. On the Kindle I just finished Nalini Singh’s Angel’s Blood and I’ve got JR Ward’s Lover Avenged queued up.

I love ’em all.