Hoofnagle.org

Reed and I had a blast from the past last night. Reed's highschool and my college friend John Dunn, who actually introduced us lo these many moons ago was in town for some training. He's a social worker living in Stanton, and he's also the first friend we had to marry and have kids. He came over and a lovely evening was had by all.

The title of this post comes from a chance remark John made about when he and I were "dating" and he was dating two other women -- about whom I knew.So John called it dating. I might have said we were "involved" briefly just before the other two women showed up and were friends afterwards as I shook my head in disgust (one of the other girls was *much* too young).

Anyhow, the point of the exercise is to wonder: when aren't you dating anymore? When are you dating in the first place? What the hell is this "dating"? Because near as I can tell I never did any of it. People were friends. People got really important. People became vital to life. People became less important. People vanished entirely sometimes. But we never went on any "dates". There was no drill of someone buying someone dinner and someone else giggling and being cutesy over it. Calling a relationship being "involved" is, I suppose just as meaningless. I just find the labels we put on things baffling. Not distasteful. Strange. Really really strange. We need to label things in order to explain them to other people, but so often our shorthand labels for things are really meaningless when reduced to their roots.

This is what Reed and I talked about while walking the dog, which is about as coherent as I can manage to be before I've had my oatmeal in the morning.

Posted by karen at January 31, 2002 12:00 AM