My Best Friend

That's my best friend Cris and me earlier this year taking a Pirate Duck Boat tour of Miami Beach, because that's the kind of thing we do. We also go to the opera, to shows, to concerts, for dim sum, we're in book club together, we try new foods because they're there, we go to the movies, we go on food tours, we buy wines and try them, we're co-captains of a fantasy football team, we host a Blog together. We do lots of stuff.

We're also there for each other for bad stuff. Other than listen to her when she needs to talk I don't know what or if I've done anything for her, but I do know what she's done for me. She sat with my dying father and Alzheimer-ridden mother while David and I made funeral arrangements for my dad a few hours before he died.  She helped us clean out my parents' apartment when my mother was no longer able to live by herself and had to be put in an assisted living facility. She helped me deal with David's hospitalization and watched me break down when in a delirium he didn't recognize me.

I've had only two best friends in my life. One when I was a child and we eventually drifted apart in our mid-teens. After her I've been blessed with lots of wonderful and important friends in different aspects of my life, but none of them were *best friends* - until I met Cris in 2000. She was a friend of several of my life-long friends through their kids' school, but somehow I had never met her. Until I did.  It took over 20 years for me to find another best friend, and when I did, the connection was immediate.

Soon we were - as we call it - sharing a brain. I'm not easy and often I don't perceive things or react to things or do things like most people. It's not because I'm special, it's really because I'm weird. And, as it turned out, so is Cris. More often than not, she and I will react or respond to something completely differently than everyone else. This happens a lot. One of us will say a couple of seemingly random, unconnected words and the other will know exactly what it means, while everyone looks at us completely clueless as to what's going on - it's as if we have a "twin language" like those you see on TV where only the two kids understand it.

It took me 20 years to find my best friend - and now she is moving to Baton Rouge because her husband's job was transferred there. I know she'll remain my best friend regardless of the distance - but she won't be here. Who will I go eat new foods with? Who will go to some weird tour or museum exhibit with me? Who will listen to me ramble when my brain is full and overwhelmed and weary?

What am I going to do when she's gone?

I don't know.

Throwback Thursday

My "tribe". I've been friends with most of these women since I was in college. A couple since high school! These are my family and I love them all so much.

This was taken in 2005, at the "Quinces" of the woman on the bottom left's daughter. She was the first of the kids to reach that milestone, and now most of the children of all of them are in colleg or already graduated from college.

Time flies!

Doctor Who and Me

It's true, I'm a Whooey! Most Doctor Who fans call themselves Whovites or Whoites - I prefer Whooey. Every Doctor Who fan has "their" Doctor, usually but not always it's the first Doctor they saw when they started watching the show, and it is so with me. See the weirdly sexy guy up there by the blue box? That's Christopher Eccleston, Doctor #9, the first of the "modern era" of Doctors, and *my* Doctor. While I acknowledge David Tennant (Doctor #10) is a better all-around Doctor, Eccleston will always be the one for me.

Do you know the story of Doctor Who? Very briefly - Doctor Who is an alien, he's from a planet called Gallifrey. The planet's indigenous inhabitants are called Time Lords, and I guess Time Ladies? In any case they can travel through time and space without limits and they live for a very very long time. Doctor Who, due to very complicated circumstances does nothing but travel across space and time and  pretty much somehow saves the world or the universe every week.

The show debuted in London on BBC on November 23, 1963, the day after President Kennedy was assassinated. An inauspicious beginning indeed. Yet - here it is and here we are on the verge of celebrating its 50th anniversary.

Appropriately I think, I got into Doctor Who through the marvels of cyberspace and virtual reality. "Mat", one of my best friends in Second Life (we'll get into that another day) is a HUGE Doctor Who fan, and he was forever talking about it and showing me Doctor Who stuff, he even has a TARDIS and can regenerate in SL. I asked him about it one day and that opened the floodgates and, I guess changed my life, in at least a small way.

It started with him giving me a brief explanation and some You Tube clips to watch. That in turn, god bless him, triggered 73,914 questions which Mat calmly-ish answered (he gets a little riled on the "Why can't the Doctor be a woman?" question). So I gingerly tread into the Whoverse via streaming Netflix. I asked Mat with what episode I should begin, and he recommended one from the "classic" Doctor Who period - those are the ones that ran from 1963 to the mid 80s. I think the one I saw was from the 70s or early 80s. That was a mistake. I simply couldn't get past the cheesy dialogue and the horrendous "special effects". This was years after the original Star Trek and the effects were so inferior I just couldn't get into the story.

After that failure Mat told me to just start watching the modern era - the ones that started in 2005 with Eccleston as the Doctor. I was hooked with the first episode and I've been falling down the time hole ever since. Now, I'm atwitter with anticipation for this weekend's 50th anniversary episode "The Day of the Doctor". Who would'a thunk it?

Later, in December, in "the Christmas episode" the current Doctor, played by Matt Smith (not my favorite but he's grown on me a bit) will leave the show, therefore regenerating into the next Doctor to be played by Peter Capaldi. With Capaldi, they'll be returning to an older Doctor, which should he interesting given that his companion is played by a very young Jenna Louise Coleman.

We'll see where the new Doctor takes us - but before that we have a grand adventure coming up this weekend!

Virtual Reality...Real Caring

 
Tonight marked the end of a two-week fund raiser for a fellow Second Lifer who lost everything, including her home,  in Superstorm Sandy. Through a series of trivia events the SL trivia community of which I'm part raised over $1500 USD for her. That translates to several hundred thousand Linden Dollars (L$) garnered by trivia hosts donating tips, trivia players donating winnings and various challenges and matching opportunities. 

What's different about this philanthropy is that only a handful of those of us who contributed actually *know* the recipient in "real life". I only know her as a kitten - literally. Her avatar in SL is a cat. Not a humanoid cat, an actual cat. This is her...

I don't know her real name and only know she live(d) in the coastal New York City area. I'm not worried that we've been "had" as obviously, several people know her. But still, I think it's amazing that a community of "virtual friends" came together so naturally and without reservation to provide "real life" help out a "friend" most of us will never meet.

I'm proud of us. Obviously $1500 is a mere drop in the bucket when faced with her losses, but it's something. Most importantly I hope it lets her know that he has a bunch of people who without knowing her, care about her, have been thinking about her and working to help her. I think after having been what she's been through, that may be the true value of this endeavor.